English Philosophical Texts

English Philosophical Texts is a collection of early English language philosophical texts published in Britain between 1650 and 1830. It provides the substance for Hume Texts Online and English Philosophical Texts Online, where these texts can be read and searched.

The texts are stored in Markit format, from which they can be automatically converted to TEI-XML or HTML. Refer to the Markit repository for further details.

Note that this project is still in its early stages. Only around 10% of the projected corpus has been imported, and many of those texts are still being checked and edited.

Lexicon

This repository also includes a lexicon grouping every word in these texts into a smaller number of lemmas. This is used by to lemmatize the texts, before performing stylistic analyses.

Ambiguous Words

Note that some words have a ` character at the end. This is to ensure that they are mapped to the appropriate lemma. For example, the word "leaves" could be the third person present singular of the verb "leave" or the plural of the the noun "leaf"; the former is written in these texts as "leaves", while the latter is written as "leaves`".

No attempts are made to disambiguate words more generally. For example, the words "alarm" and "alarms" both map to the same lemma "alarm", even though both may occur as either a verb or a noun. Disambiguation on a larger scale would be unfeasible, and is kept to a minimum here.

For a full list of disambiguated words, search the lexicon.yml file for the ` character.