Background and history

My original ‘Qcorpus’ was created as the basis of my doctoral work looking at the distinctiveness of early Quaker language. For that purpose I wanted texts or samples of as similar size as possible. I decided to use extracts of longer booklength works, varying in each case which portion of the text to extract. This was to prevent the swamping of the whole corpus by a few very long items. The QHA now has only full texts (which would swamp if all the texts are chosen) and the extracts no longer feature.

I limited my choice of texts to those held at Friends House Library as I could easily work with the original material.