[open-literature] Open Shakespeare API and canting dictionaries

Sun Mar 6 20:41:35 UTC 2011

John,

Hopefully the Open Shakespeare team won't think me speaking out of turn 
but you should be able to run a search of the site using the url: 
http://openshakespeare.org/search?query=<insert search term(s) here>. 
That returns an HTML list of lines and the tests where the term(s) can 
be found.

Not sure that you can search by lemma (is this the same as leme?) 
(Xapian stems words) but if folks are happy, I can try to look at 
lemmatisation this week and start doing something towards it. I'm 
thinking of trying to do something like this for Open Correspondence 
(and perhaps, Rufus, it could be added to the ideas of textkit? - just a 
thought).

Best,

Iain
On 01/03/2011 11:51, John Levin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Jonathan Gray suggested I post here concerning a project I'm working 
> on concerning early modern English canting dictionaries, for which I 
> would like to use Open Shakespeare .
>
> Cant dictionaries were glossaries of what was purportedly the secret 
> language of thieves, rogues and vagabonds. The fundamental question is 
> whether these words were really used, whether by criminals and the 
> common people, or if they were invented or taken from other sources. 
> Connected to this is whether the terms, once printed, were taken up, 
> and if so, who by.
>
> That's the humanistic question. To answer it, I want to check the 
> dictionaries against large corpuses of texts, in particular plays and 
> legal testimony (where the criminals' tongue and commoners speech is 
> recorded). One body of text I want to do this with is Shakespeare, and 
> Open Shakespeare is, well, open!
>
> Is there an API that allows me to automatically search O.S. for a set 
> of terms? Is it possible to search by the leme (stem) of a word (for 
> example, 'nab' can be conjugated as nabbed, nabbing)?
>
> For an example of the dictionaries, I've recently transcribed a small 
> glossary from Shadwell's play 'The Squire of Alsatia':
> http://alsatia.org.uk/site/2011/02/shadwells-glossary/
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>