About LangScape’s Texts

For the bounds in English, most of the ‘Top Texts’ were taken, by generous permission, from the Dictionary of Old English corpus (see History of the Project). The Dictionary of Old English texts derive in the main from published editions, and they had been copied into electronic form with an extraordinary degree of accuracy. Errors in these texts thus mainly represent errors in their printed sources.

For the LangScape project we have compared these electronic texts with the texts in the editions of the British Academy Charters series where they exist and with recently published/widely available editions where they do not.

Crucially, each text was then checked and corrected against the original manuscripts (or in a small handful of cases against microfilm or digital image). Variations between our own readings and those in the editions against which we have checked our texts are recorded in the textual paraphernalia.

The bounds in Latin and the 'Variant Texts' have been freshly transcribed from the manuscripts, and further compared against recent editions where they exist. Many of these texts have not been previously published and are thus uniquely available in the LangScape database.