Corpus of Women's Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE19) (1800-1899) version 27 March 2025

CoWITE19: The 19th Century Sub-Corpus of the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English

CoWITE19 is a purpose-built sub-corpus of the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE), designed to facilitate the linguistic study of female-authored instructive writing produced in the 19th century. The CoWITE19 sub-corpus comprises transcribed and annotated digital editions of texts written by British women and published between 1800 and 1899. These texts primarily belong to the genre of instructive prose, encompassing cookery books, domestic guides, medical handbooks, and other forms of didactic writing addressed to a female audience or authored from a woman's perspective.

Structure and Contents

CoWITE19 files with standardized encoding, encompassing:

• Textual genre (e.g., recipe book, domestic manual, household medicine)

• Author information (name, sex, place and date of publication)

• Publication details (publisher, location, year)

• Linguistic annotation (normalized spelling, part-of-speech tagging)

• Thematic classification (e.g., cookery, childcare, etiquette, herbalism)

Goals and Applications

The main aim of CoWITE19 is to provide empirical data for the analysis of interpersonal and instructional language used by women during the 19th century. Researchers may use this corpus to explore mophological, syntactic, discourse ,and pragmatic phenomena.

Compilation and Access

The sub-corpus is curated and maintained by Francisco Alonso-Almeida and colleagues at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. All texts have been transcribed from original editions held in historical archives or digital repositories, with a focus on accuracy and scholarly utility. Editors keep on correcting and expanding the corpus as much as they can.

CoWITE19 is a constituent of the broader CoWITE collection, which spans from 1550 to 1900. It complements earlier sub-corpora (CoWITE16, CoWITE17, CoWITE18) by extending the diachronic scope of the database and allowing comparative historical research.