The period covered by the Lampeter Corpus, 1640 to 1740, marks a crucial period in English history as well as in the elaboration of English as a multi-purpose language. The texts selected for the corpus reflect both the standardisation process of English and historical developments between the outbreak of the Civil War and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In order to meet the needs of linguists and historians alike, the Lampeter project has made an effort to create a balanced corpus rather than a randomly chosen archive or collection. A balanced corpus, then, is characterised by a number of transparent sampling criteria. The ones that have served as guidelines for the compilation of the Lampeter Corpus are listed below:

Scope

Tracts and pamphlets published in the century between 1640 and 1740, all of them available in the Founders' Library at the University of Wales, Lampeter.

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Setup

• Division of the century into ten decades.
• Each decade consists of six domains, i.e.
• Religion
• Politics
• Economy & Trade
• Science
• Law
• Miscellaneous
• Two texts per domain within each decade, leading to

120 different texts, amounting to c. 1.1 million words.

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Sampling criteria

• Complete texts only, including dedications, prefaces, postscripts, etc.

Texts are of varying length, ranging from c. 3,000 to c. 20,000 words.
• Each author appears only once, in order to avoid idiosyncratic language use.

Major literary figures of the time were excluded since their style of writing can be studied in other, already existing, collections.
• Generally only first editions of the texts; later editions only if changes were made by the original authors, thus ensuring the authenticity of the language.

No intermediary modern editions of the texts were used.

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Text encoding

• Markup according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and use of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), in collaboration with Lou Burnard and the Oxford Text Archive.
• TEI text headers for background information on authors (name, age, sex, place of residence, education, social status, political affiliation), printers/publishers, place and date of print, print date, publication format, text characteristics, bibliographical references - providing the framework for historical, sociolinguistic and stylistic investigations.

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