Eleven Thousand Latin Texts

11K Latin Texts
By David Bamman

Here's a bunch of OCR'd Latin texts from the Internet Archive used in our JCDL 2011 and JoCCH 2012 papers (see below). These are all texts that have been identified as being written primarily in Latin (via automatic language ID on the text of the book + manual confirmation). The data released here consists of the entire books, not just the Latin portions (though the Latin parts can easily be extracted by running language ID (e.g., langid.py) on them. What's useful about this data is:

• It's big (11,261 texts spanning two millennia, containing 1.38 billion tokens in total).
• The metadata for these volumes contains not just the date of publication for a specific edition of a work, but a window for the date of composition as well (as determined by undergraduate students in Classics; see JCDL 2011 for more details), which enables historical analysis that the date of publication can't. The metadata may have a few errors and style differences between the different annotators, but I'm putting it up on Github for version control if anyone spots mistakes and wants to correct them.

Data

• All texts in DJVU XML, with formatting for paragraph/line breaks, etc. (9GB) [Download]
• All texts in plain text format (3.9GB) [Download]
• Metadata [Github repo]. For those who'd like to contribute, an additional 10,248 likely Latin texts from the Internet Archive await estimation of their date of composition in that repo (and we can add those texts to the corpus once they've been dated.)

Read the rest...