Digital Humanities
Database Links
This list is far from
exhaustive, but it gives some idea of what’s
available.
1.
Metadata
and General
Early Modern Digital
Agendas:
http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Early_Modern_Digital_Agendas
Folger Institute projects.
Some of them are listed below, but for a complete list
(not all early modern) see:
http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Alphabetical_listing_of_digital_resources_at_the_Folger#A-C
Early Modern Hub:
http://earlymodernweb.org/
This is a one-person show by
Sharon Howard, maintaining a list of links to
open-access online resources for early modernists.
Google Books:
http://books.google.com/
Don’t knock it! There is a
surprising amount of early modern literature available
on full view (along with a frustrating amount that
does not even offer a preview). I just searched for a
Latin text (Otto Brunfels’ Onomasticon
medicinae, 1543) and found three different
copies, all with full view!
Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/
People often seem to
overlook this, but it has a huge amount of material.
For texts, it’s best on 19th-century
material, but there’s a lot of 19th-century
scholarship on the early modern period that’s sinking
into oblivion, and there are some real gems here,
along with later editions of early modern material,
which can be very revealing in themselves.
National Archives:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
The starting point for
almost anything to do with civic life. This site will
tell you where to find the records for who was in the
Gatehouse prison in the 1650s, or the names of Members
of Parliament in Cornwall at the beginning of the 17th
century, etc., etc.
University of Oxford Text
Archive (OTA):
http://ota.ox.ac.uk/
Comprehensive links to
resources, some of which are unrestricted, but many
require a log-in.
2.
Early
Modern Resources (Manuscripts and Printed Texts)
a)
General
Resources
British Literary
Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance:
http://gdc.gale.com/products/british-literary-manuscripts-online-medieval-and-renaissance/
A Gale resource, so log-in
is required. Even so, adroit use of the portal (https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/resources/mo/)
can at least identify and locate material. Free trial
available.
Catalogue of English
Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM):
http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/
Probably the database of
first choice for locating manuscripts. Detailed
catalogue entries for 37,000+ manuscripts.
Corpus Query Processor
(CQP):
https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/
A University of Lancaster
initiative. Free log-in on request to gain limited
access. The best part of this is for early modernists
is the Early English Books Online V2 and V3, but these
can’t be accessed with a regular log-in and one has to
be attached to a participating institution. If one can
gain access, one can do such things as analyze the
EEBO corpus according to genre.
OK,
so that’s the bad news. The good news is that a
regular log-in gives one access to the Corpus of
English Dialogues (qv), the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus
(which only covers part of 1654 so far, but is still
well worthwhile) and the Shakespeare First Folio,
along with other resources not related to the early
modern period.
EEBO:
http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
Chadwyck Healey portal for
Early English Books Online. Log-in needed.
EEBO TCP:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/
University of Michigan
portal for the Text Creation Partnership database. No
log-in needed.
ESTC:
http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=login-bl-estc
The English Short-Title Catalogue. No
log-in required.
Private Libraries in
Renaissance England (PLRE):
http://plre.folger.edu/
An ongoing Folger project,
giving an indispensable insight into patterns of early
modern book ownership. No log-in required.
b)
Resources
for Specific Genres/Topic Areas
Broadside Ballads Online:
http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
A Bodleian Library
resource. Comprehensive catalogue of broadsheets,
together with PDF files.
Corpus of English Dialogues
1560-1760 (CED):
https://www.engelska.uu.se/research/english-language/electronic-resources/english-dialogues/
An Oxford Text Archive
project. A 1.2-million-word database, about 500,000 of
which are authentic dialogue, taken from trial
proceedings and witness depositions, and some 700,000
are constructed dialogue, taken from drama and other
prose sources. A free log-in can be obtained via the
Lancaster Corpus Query Processor (qv), or one can
apply directly to Oxford Text Archive to download the
database.
Database of Early English
Playbooks (DEEP):
http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/
Built up from ESTC, EEBO
and other sources. Basically a detailed catalogue.
Digital Quaker Collection
(DQC):
http://esr.earlham.edu/dqc/
Searchable database of 17th-
& 18th-century Quaker texts.
Early Modern Letters Online:
http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
This project does for
letters what ESTC does for printed texts. It is
basically a detailed catalogue, often with an abstract
of the contents, but not full transcripts.
English Handwriting
1500-1700:
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/index.html
A cornucopia of resources!
An essential tool for anyone working with manuscript
material.
The Full English (Folk
Songs)
https://www.vwml.org.uk/archives-catalogue/
Transcripts of over 44,000
folk songs, searchable by title and first line (as
well as by performer, etc.). Full-text PDFs of
manuscripts and printed songs, some with scores,
others plain text. Most
of the material postdates the early modern period as
such, but much of it may go back to early modern
roots.
Hooke’s Books:
http://www.hookesbooks.com/
A searchable transcription of the books
in Robert Hooke’s library.
Lost Plays Database:
https://lostplays.folger.edu/Main_Page
Searchable database of
information relating to plays that are no longer
extant.
Post-Reformation Digital
Library
http://www.prdl.org/
Theology and philosophy,
full-text; based on EEBO.
Private libraries in
Renaissance England
https://plre.folger.edu/
A wonderful resource
supplementing the printed volumes.
Records of Early English
Drama:
http://reed.utoronto.ca/
Historical documents relating to the
theatre. Also has a fine set of links.
Spencer’s Letters:
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/haphazard/letters/lettersindex.html
Transcripts of diplomatic and other
papers relating to Spencer’s years in Ireland. For
other related Spencer links see http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/.
William Corbett’s bookshop:
https://corbettsbookshop.omeka.net/
A project building on the
ESTC and EEBO TCP databases and showing the contents
of a seventeenth-century bookshop based on a 1626
inventory of its stock. The link doesn’t seem to work
for some reason, but it turns up easily enough in a
Google keyword search. No log-in required.
3.
Mixed/Languages
other than English:
Ancient Greece and Rome
Perseus Digital Library:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
Greek & Latin. Mainly
useful for Greek and Latin texts, but also has Arabic,
German, Italian and other material.
Perseus Word Study Tool:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph
Greek & Latin. Part of
previous. Invaluable guide to Greek and Latin words
(also Arabic and Old Norse), with full explanations of
inflected forms, copious examples, etc.
France
Bibliothèques Virtuelles
Humanistes (CSR [Centre
d'études Supérieures
de la Renaissance]):
http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/actualites.asp
French.
Germany
Mediaevum.de
http://www.mediaevum.de/
German. Comprehensive links
for online resources.
Wörterbücher
http://woerterbuchnetz.de/
German. Great for
translating Middle High German into modern German.
Italy
Biblioteca Virtuale Online
(Istituto Nazionale di Studi
sul Rinascimento · SIGNUM):
https://www.insr.it/bivio/
Italian. Digitized texts.
Spain
Biblioteca Virtual Miguel
de Cervantes:
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/
Spanish. Includes a large
collection of early modern material.
Switzerland
Digitized Rare Books from
Swiss Libraries
http://www.e-rara.ch/
Various
Annotated Books Online:
http://www.annotatedbooksonline.com/
Annotated copies of early
modern books in Latin, Arabic, Dutch, English, etc. 94
books scanned so far. Free registration.
4.
Resources
in Fields other than Literature
Art:
Copyrighthub:
http://www.copyrighthub.co.uk/get-permission/images#
Tracking down images and
artwork. This often succeeds where Google Images
fails.
Google Images:
https://images.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl
The URL search is
particularly useful for tracking down the original
source of images posted on the web.
Web Gallery of Art:
http://www.wga.hu/index1.html
Extensive searchable
database, particularly good on Renaissance art, with a
browsable list of painters. Open access.
History:
British History Online:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
Primary and secondary
sources mainly for the period 1300-1800.
London before the Great
Fire (animated 3D reconstruction):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPY-hr-8-M0
A very atmospheric
reconstruction.
Medicine:
Early Modern Practitioners:
http://practitioners.exeter.ac.uk/
Searchable database of
doctors and medicine.
Music:
Inventories & Databases
for Early Music Sources:
http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/scores/sources.html
Medieval and Renaissance
Music Resources:
https://www.angelfire.com/mi/spanogle/emusic.html
Printing:
Atlas of Early Printing:
http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/
A bit shaky in its
performance, but gives a very clear idea of the spread
of printing during the 15th century.
Religion:
Calvinism Resources Database:
http://www.calvin.edu/library/database/card/
Who were the Nuns?
http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/
Convent records.
5.
Techie
Stuff
Reference Guide for the
British National Corpus:
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/index.html
The British National Corpus
(http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/)
is a database of spoken and written modern English, so
it is not directly relevant to early modernists.
However, the principles on which it is organized
underlie other databases. Not for beginners!
Text Encoding Initiative:
http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
This is another specialized
site, for people who are actively working on database
construction. Useful stuff, but not for beginners!
Zoho drag and drop:
https://www.zoho.com/creator/build-online-database.html?gclid=CM_34d6GmcYCFYcJvAodWSwAGA
Possibly the easiest way to
get started on creating databases. Two-week free
trial.
