ABSTRACT
Electronic dictionaries and corpora are now familiar resources in humanities computing, useful both in linguistic research and in the many disciplines where searching for words can produce historical or social information or literary insights. People are reaching a point where these tools are moving on, becoming more complex in their computing architecture and more powerful in what they can achieve. It is to be hoped that, before too long, the considerable achievements of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in tools for text analysis can be harnessed for the benefit of work on historical and non-standard language. The author has a involvement in the Linguistic and Cultural Heritage Electronic Network project (LICHEN), headed by Lisa-Lena Opas-Hnninen at the University of Oulu, Finland, which aims to collect and display languages of the circumarctic region. A Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) category or subcategory can also contribute to work on keywords, in the sense of words that reveal cultural preoccupations.
