Background and history

The Lampeter project was initiated in 1991 by Prof. Dr. Josef Schmied and Eva Hertel at Bayreuth University and moved with them to Chemnitz in 1993. During his stay as a visiting professor at the University of Wales, Lampeter in 1991, Prof. Schmied had learned of the vast resources available in the University's Founders' Library and worked out an arrangement with the library staff for their collaboration in the building of a corpus of Early Modern English. The main objective of the project was to fill a gap in the market of historical corpora, which lacked a balanced corpus with complete texts for text-linguistic and stylistic analysis.

The project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the German Research Association, from 1994 to 1998. Travel grants made available by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the German Academic Exchange Service, have made possible research collaboration with the English Department at Helsinki University (today part of the Department of Modern Languages) and the Department of Linguistics & English Language at Lancaster University (Gerald Knowles, Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson) on questions of corpus compilation and annotation.