A New Use For the Old Bailey Proceedings: The History of Linguistics

Magnus Huber, Department of English, University of Giessen, notes at the blog Varieng that The Old Bailey Corpus provides digitzed transcripts of the Old Bailey Proceedings that should allow linguists and historians to determine more precisely what spoken English sounded like before the invention of recorded sound. His post provides detail and an explanation of the scope and limitation of the project. He says that while the project didn't begin as a linguistic one, it does provide a lot of background information for linguistic researchers because it is a full-text database. However, it isn't keyword searchable.