Basic structure of EMMA

Early-Modern Multiloquent Authors consists of 50 carefully selected authors across 5 generations. The following graph gives an overview of the corpus distribution.

Selection criteria included

• prolific writers: min. 500,000 words/author
• career & distribution: long career with sufficient material across career stages
• London-based elite
• social network information: connections within and across generations
  • religion: Church of England vs Non-Conformists; Quakers
  • politics: Royalists vs Parliamentarians
  • professions: clergy, politicians, dramatists/authors, philosophers, scientists

Genre balance was not a primary criterion. However, the corpus contains considerable amounts of text from the predominant written genres of the 17th century. The following is a table of those genres that are represented by at least 50,000 words in every generation for the first four generations in EMMA phase I.

A more detailed description of the corpus is being prepared for submission to the ICAME journal.