Technical information

Format

ECEP has been built in MS Access format as a relational database consisting of ‘forms’ and ‘fields’ integrated in a variety of ‘tables’.

ECEP is available to users as a digital resource hosted on the University of Sheffield web farm. A web-based application has been developed by the Humanities Research Institute, using client-side HTML and Javascript and server-side PHP and MySQL. The interface displays two layouts – Browse, Search – and offers a download function in CSV file format, which can then be easily exported to Excel (or similar) format. The design aims to replicate the MS Access format, and therefore it offers three main blocks of data: the lexical sets plus metadata for works and for authors (see Table 1).

The proposed digital resource is freely available in a visually and technically user-friendly design.

Web-based interface

The web-based interface offers a Browse and a Search layout for Works and Authors. The Search tool allows users to search in one field or in a combination of fields. Fields which contain a predefined list of values offer an automatic drop-down list menu to facilitate selection. Lexical sets and example words can be searched in the entire database or within a particular work. Users can also download their searches into a CSV file, easily converted to Excel format.