Query about using the Internet for historical-linguistic research

[Conor Snoek]

Hi Yazan,

I am wondering if your problem with finding data does not reside in the
vagueness of your query. Whose discourse are you intending to look at? In
which language?

Perhaps specifically sampling a number of blogs or sources would lead to a
more reliable dataset.

If you are interested in English words, then COCA

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

is an excellent and freely available resource that has entries up to the
Summer of 2012.

If you are looking for linguistics papers perhaps 'diachronic lingusitics'
rather than 'historical lingusitics' would be a better search term. These
might seem to denote the same field, but it seems to me that studies in
semantic change over a shallow time depth are more likley to make reference
to the former term rather than the latter.

Anyway, I hope this helps!

Conor

I was wondering if anyone has used the internet as an archive to
investigate the emergence of certain terminology and/or the shifts in their
use over the years. I am looking into the history of certain terms that are
used in the discourse on Arab uprisings, trying to understand when certain
terms gained currency and how their semantic and pragmatic references
evolved. I have tried using Google search, but the results were far from
satisfactory since many results appeared to be much older than they really
are. Archive.org seems like a good resource, but it only allows you to see
earlier snap-shots of individual websites, so you cannot search for
instances of use of certain terms across several websites. My guess is that
there must be a simple way to do this kind of search, but I have no idea
what that might be. Would appreciate some tips and suggestions.

Many thanks!




-- 
Conor Snoek, PhD Candidate
Department of Linguistics,
4-32 Assiniboia Hall, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E7