Stephen R. Reimer, The Chadwyck-Healey Poetry Database

The Canon of John Lydgate Project

The Canon of John Lydgate: Related Papers

A Review of the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Database

Reimer, Stephen R. "The Chadwyck-Healey Full Text English Poetry Database." A Review, published in Computers & Texts (the newsletter of the CTI Textual Studies / Office for Humanities Communication, Oxford), no. 11 (March 1996): 13-18 (including a response from Stephen Pocock, Managing Editor and Head of Data Conversion, Chadwyck-Healey, Ltd.).

I am currently working on a reassessment of the canon of John Lydgate, the prolific fifteenth-century disciple of Geoffrey Chaucer. Towards that end, and with a generous permission from the Early English Text Society to use their editions, I am creating a substantial textbase of fifteenth-century English verse: this textbase is at present incomplete but is intended eventually to include all of Lydgate, every work ever attributed to Lydgate, and, for purposes of comparison, all of the works of his contemporaries, immediate predecessors and successors. The Chadwyck-Healey Full Text English Poetry Database has appeared, then, at a very opportune time for me: as a complete transcription of English verse from Beowulf through to the end of the nineteenth century, it promised to be all that I needed for my study of Lydgate and the fifteenth century and more, and it should have saved me a great deal of work. What follows, then, is a very idiosyncratic and narrowly focussed "review" of the Chadwyck-Healey five CD-ROM product, primarily to explain why their collection of electronic texts will not serve my particular purposes in my particular project. My observations, however, will also have a more general applicability, since many of the limitations which I have encountered are the result of methodological choices affecting the whole collection; I suspect, therefore, that the limitations which I find in the late medieval section of the Database may well be limitations others will also encounter in other sections.

[For the full text, see the above mentioned publication.]

The Canon of John Lydgate Project

email: Stephen.Reimer@UAlberta.Ca
URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/lydgate.htm/