[Corpora-List] Desperate Appeal for help - in search of Medieval French corpora

[Serge HEIDEN]

Dear Claire,

| I'm quite desperately in need of corpora of Medieval French from 800C to
| 1600C. They must be dated and, most importantly, viewable (as
| opposed to simply allowing for statistical analysis, etc.).

I know that you have already been in contact with our group : the BFM project (Base de Français
Médiéval).
The database it uses includes about 60 texts which correspond to about 2.7 millions words (the texts
being from 842 to 16th , mainly from 12-13th century) [contact Alexei.Lavrentev at ens-lsh.fr].
So I suppose you've been able to access the database through the Weblex software
[see http://weblex.ens-lsh.fr/doc/weblex.pdf].
Facing a clear act of despair, I can not be satisfied of an awkward silence.
Could you please explain what you mean by :
- dated texts : medieval texts are particular with respect to datation ;
- viewable as opposed to other types of access.

What interests me here is the question of corpora diffusion or delivery. If you cannot
give the electronic texts 'as is' directly (like a file or online edition) for any reason -
copyright, technical, political... - but instead propose an access method through
different kinds of tools, for example Web based, questions rise of the right tools,
their good documentation, sufficient documentation of the texts, etc. One way to
circumvent all this is to ask people to try to explain what they are looking for, so as
to try to do some part of the work, or maybe adapt tools. It is what we try to do in
the BFM project, for free : there is extensive documentation of texts, Weblex does
CQP concordances and indexes, etc. but Web interface and documentation is
coarse for linguists.
With feedback we can change things.
Is it the right way to do ? what do you propose ?

Best,

    [Serge Heiden]

_____________________________________________________________________
Serge Heiden, slh at ens-lsh.fr, https://weblex.ens-lsh.fr
ENS-LSH/CNRS - ICAR UMR5191, Institut de Linguistique Française
15, parvis René Descartes 69342 Lyon BP7000 Cedex, tél. +33 4 37 37 63 12, fax. +33 4 37 37 62 65