Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions

都柏林圣三一学院（以下简称TCD）的“1641年证词”包括约4000份个人陈述，主要是各阶层的新教男女讲述了他们在1641年爱尔兰天主教叛乱爆发后的经历。这些证人证词由政府任命的专员收集，大约有2万页，构成了一项备受争议的指控的主要证据，即叛乱始于对新教定居者的大规模屠杀。因此，这些材料一直是旷日持久、痛苦的历史争议的核心。这些材料是近代早期欧洲其他地方所无法比拟的，为1641年叛乱的起因和事件以及17世纪爱尔兰、英格兰和苏格兰的社会、经济、文化、宗教、政治和语言历史提供了独特的信息来源。此外，这些遗书生动地记录了各种殖民和“文明”进程，包括新教在斯图亚特王国最偏远地区之一的传播，低地农业和商业实践的引入，以及当地人对这些发展的反应。早期来自AHRC和IRCHSS的主要资助资助了这些证词的转录和数字化，使它们能够在线提供，并可供各种学者分析，从而促进跨学科合作。目前的提案旨在探索如何创建一个计算机环境，在这个环境中，对历史和语料库语言学感兴趣的学者可以与历史学家和其他专家合作，通过利用IBM LanguageWare开发的有效语言技术，以目前不可能的方式来询问1641年的证词。该项目的主要目标是创建一个个性化的计算机环境，在这个环境中，语言学研究人员可以对数字化的1641项沉积进行复杂的发现、分析和可视化，并与同事就这些资源进行实时合作。这项研究的长期成果可以帮助推动数字人文学科中语言学和历史研究方式的革命。开发符合文本编码计划（TEI）的语料库，并遵循解决互操作性问题的公认国际标准，将使该项目能够与其他重要的数字研究计划（包括DARIAH和CLARIN）联系起来。这些记录在早期现代英语中的证词，在微观层面上为爱尔兰的语言变化提供了证据，而在宏观层面上，它们代表了（准）法律话语和屠杀话语。EME的可变性加上证词中声音的变化给语言学家（和计算机分析师）带来了特殊的挑战，需要大量的跨学科咨询。在该项目的总体目标中，具体的语言目标如下：发展爱尔兰17世纪英语的语言模式；发展17世纪英语的本体论，姓氏和地名；探讨中介语篇中词性和词性变异的本地化可能性；调查17世纪法律话语在文本中的表现，特别关注话语的框架，从而对证词中证据的质量和性质进行语言评估；并调查证人证词中关于大屠杀、暴行和种族清洗的说法。从计算机科学到历史，从暴行研究到语言学，各个领域的专家之间的广泛接触，以及工业界和学术界之间的接触，是这一建议的一个突出特点，它取决于真正的知识交流和资源增强。

The '1641 Depositions' in Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD) comprise some 4,000 personal statements, in which mainly Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in 1641. Collected by government-appointed commissioners, the witness testimony runs to approximately 20,000 pages, and constitutes the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers. As a result, this material has been central to protracted and bitter historical dispute. This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland. In addition, the depositions vividly document various colonial and 'civilizing' processes, including the spread of Protestantism in one of the remotest regions of the Stuart kingdoms and the introduction of lowland agricultural and commercial practices, together with the native response to these developments. Earlier major grants from the AHRC and the IRCHSS have sponsored the transcription and digitization of the depositions, making them available online and amenable to analysis by a variety of scholars and thereby facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration.The current proposal aims to explore how a computer environment can be created in which scholars interested in historical and corpus linguistics can work collaboratively with historians and other specialists to interrogate the 1641 Depositions, in ways not currently possible, by exploiting effective language technology developed by IBM LanguageWare. The principal objective of the project is to create a personalised computer environment in which linguistic researchers can conduct sophisticated discovery, analysis and visualisation of the digitised 1641 Depositions, and collaborate in real time with colleagues on these resources. The long-term outcome of this research can help to drive a revolution in the way linguistic and historical research is conducted in the Digital Humanities. Developing a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant corpus and following accepted international standards that address interoperability issues will enable the project to link with other crucial digital research initiatives, including DARIAH and CLARIN.Recorded in Early Modern English, the Depositions provide evidence of linguistic variation in Ireland on the micro-level, while on the macro-level they represent (quasi-)legal discourse and the discourse of massacre. EME variability coupled with shifting voices in the Depositions present linguists (and computer analysts) with particular challenges and will require considerable interdisciplinary consultation. Within the overall aims of the project, the specific linguistic objectives are as follows: to develop language models for seventeenth-century English in Ireland; to develop ontologies of seventeenth-century English, surnames and place names; to investigate the possibility of localizing morphological and lexical variants in mediated text; to investigate 17th century legal discourse as it is represented in the texts, with particular attention to the framing of the discourse, leading to a linguistic assessment of the quality and nature of the evidence in the Depositions; and to investigate the discourse of massacre, atrocity and ethnic cleansing presented in the witness testimony. Extended contact between specialists in a variety of fields, from Computer Science to History, to Atrocity Studies, to Linguistics, and between industry and academia, is an outstanding feature of this proposal, which hinges upon real knowledge exchange andresource enhancement.