ECCO-TCP (Markdown)

Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Text Creation Partnership: hand-keyed transcriptions of 18th-century books, converted from TCP's XML to Markdown. 3,101 texts, 1701-1800, about 108 million words. That is the whole ECCO-TCP collection: the 2,473 texts TCP keyed, proofed and released, plus the 628 texts it keyed and encoded but never fully proofed (ecco_proofed = false).

TCP keyed each text twice and proofed it to a 99.995% accuracy target. Characters the keyers could not read are marked, never guessed.

Text

The text is lightly normalised from the XML. Every change is decided by an XML tag or by the corpus itself:

• superscript abbreviations tagged in the XML are expanded on whole tokens (y^e the, y^t that, w^t with, y^u you, w^ch which ...), other superscripts are printed inline (Mr, St)
• TCP's own <expan> is used for <choice> abbreviations
• an abbreviation stroke after a vowel becomes n/m only when the rest of the corpus decides: the candidate occurs at least 20 times and 20x more often than the other (frō becomes from, vpō becomes vpon; thē stays, since then and them are both common)
• long s becomes s, vv becomes w

There is no spelling modernisation. u/v and i/j are as printed.

Gaps use TCP's own markers: • per illegible letter, 〈◊〉 for an illegible word, 〈…〉 for longer, 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉, 〈♫〉, 〈1 page missing〉 ... Nothing is filled in.

Layout: # headings by division, paragraphs, verse one line per line, **Speaker** in drama, [Illustration: TCP's figure description], notes as Markdown footnotes [^n] at the end. Page breaks, running heads and catchwords are dropped. Each text starts with a short YAML front matter and a title line.

Sources

The Oxford TEI P5 edition (Oxford Text Archive, hdl 20.500.14106) is used when it exists and is complete. Otherwise the text comes from TCP's P4 XML bulk release: for the 628 unproofed texts, which OTA does not publish, and for 3 texts where the P5 conversion lost paragraph text around figures (at least 47 consecutive P4 words absent from P5). source, p4_reason, source_file, source_sha256 and ota_handle are on every row.

source	reason	books	words
ota_p5	-	2,470	75,765,525
tcp_p4	not_on_ota	628	32,062,993
tcp_p4	p5_incomplete	3	353,280

Checks

Compared with TCP's P4 XML bulk release (3,101 files) and with the ECCO-TCP IDs in uwgraphics/VEP2_TCP_SimpleText. Details are in verification.json.

• Same 3,101 IDs as the P4 release. The 2,473 proofed IDs match VEP's list exactly.
• 99.97% of the P4 words are in the text. The lowest book keeps 97.7%. The difference is the abbreviation expansions listed above.
• Titles match the P4 headers for every book.
• Every book passes the converter's own two checks: invariant_ok (the letters and digits equal the source XML, with gaps, footnotes and added layout accounted for) and v1_ok (every changed word is a logged substitution).

Dates

date is the imprint date from the TCP header, as printed (1706 [1705], [1780?] ...). year is the certain bracketed year if there is one, else the first year. For 80 books the P5 header has no date, so date and year come from the P4 header instead. One book, K132895.000, has no date in either source.

Word counts

n_words uses our own tokeniser and sums to 108,181,798. Other tokenisers give a slightly different number. See STATS.md for counts by source, decade, language and proofing.

Official sources

To check the numbers above:

• TCP, ECCO-TCP: https://www.textpartnership.net/pages/ecco-tcp.html (2,473 texts released, 628 keyed but not fully proofed)
• Oxford Text Archive, ECCO collection, OAI-PMH set hdl_20.500.14106_7: https://llds.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/llds/oai/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=hdl_20.500.14106_7. Single texts are at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14106/<TCP id>.
• The 2,473 proofed ECCO-TCP IDs in an independent copy, used as a cross-check: https://github.com/uwgraphics/VEP2_TCP_SimpleText (folders K0/, K1/)

Licence and credit

TCP texts are CC0 1.0. Please credit the Text Creation Partnership (University of Michigan, University of Oxford and the libraries that funded it). Page images belong to Gale and are not included.