ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea introduced in Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003/2017, vi) that uncovering historical linguistic change in legacy texts from earlier periods of English relies on the retrieval of accurate metadata and an approach to them that is informed by a wide array of different fields of scholarship. Of particular concern is applying this orientation to achieve a deeper understanding of the interplay between linguistic choices and social status in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR). The latter is an open access “big data” digital corpus consisting of letters pertaining to Ireland composed between the 17th and early 20th centuries. The CORIECOR Visualized project has permitted us to enhance the dataset such that queries with respect to specific social characteristics of the writers that are potentially pertinent to charting the progress of linguistic changes over geographical, social, and temporal space can be automatically quantified and visualized.1
