eFontes. The Electronic Corpus of Polish Medieval Latin and its Users

Krzysztof Nowak, Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków

The Electronic Corpus of Polish Medieval Latin eFontes aims to account for the use of the
Latin language on the Polish territory during the Middle Ages. The texts to be included have
been chosen primarily for their communicative function and genre to which they belong, but
the corpus representativeness is controlled also in regard to the place and time of text
composition. Although formally synchronic, the corpus covers the years 1000-1550, which
makes for over five centuries of language use. As such, its structure necessarily reflects the
diachronic dynamics of the Polish written production.

In this paper we demonstrate how the eFontes project aims at catering
for different research needs. First, we briefly present the architecture of
the corpus. Apart from a large and roughly balanced corpus maius,
containing entire texts, we build more rigorously controlled corpus
minus, consisting of shorter texts and text samples. Known from major
corpora projects, this design reflects varying interests of the users, both
linguists and historians.

Second, we present the Editions platform which allows to consult the original editions of
texts included in the corpus (https://editiones.scriptores.pl). In this way, scholars and students
of the Middle Ages may interact with medieval works in more traditional linear form.
Third, we describe our attempts at building a community of corpus users. During the annual
project workshops, addressed to experienced scholars, we examine specific problems related
to corpus building, such as diverging text typologies, metadata curations etc. Regular
seminars of the project, on the other hand, are organized to familiarize students and scholars
with fundamental techniques of digital humanities research and corpus linguistics.

References
Hernández Campoy, Juan Manuel, and Natalie Schilling. 2014. ‘The Application of the
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Principle’. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, edited by Juan Manuel Hernández
Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre, 63–79. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.