Bridging edition and corpus: a review of P. S. Post Scriptum: A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writing (Early Modern Portugal and Spain)
DOI: 10.18716/ride.a.10.4
Abstract
The project P. S. Post Scriptum (2012–2017) was aimed at the collection, edition, and analysis of Spanish and Portuguese private letters from the 16th to the early 19th century. As a result, a digital text collection and edition of the letters is presented on the project website. P. S. Post Scriptum can be classified both as a scholarly edition and a diachronic linguistic corpus and can be considered pioneer work in combining procedures from textual criticism together with the linguistic preparation of the corpus, serving the needs of both historians and linguists. Valuable basic work has been done in encoding approximately 5,000 letters which can be downloaded in different formats on the website. Only an open licence for reuse of the data remains desirable and at times the project could have benefitted from an even more advantageous presentation of the results on the website.
In the P. S. Post Scriptum project, private letters written in Spain and Portugal between the 16th and the early 19th century were collected, edited, and analyzed. Almost all of the letters were previously unpublished, so a digital collection and edition of them was one of the main goals of the project. Another priority was the historical and linguistic study of the letters in this diachronic corpus. The P. S. Post Scriptum project was funded with an ERC Grant between 2012 and 2017 and was hosted at the faculty of arts and humanities of the University of Lisbon.* This review is about the digital text collection and edition of the letters resulting from P. S. Post Scriptum and published at http://ps.clul.ul.pt/.*