Project

EarlyPrint is a specialized digital archive featuring texts from the early English print record, ranging from 1473 to the early 1700s. Comprising nearly 60,000 different entries of books, manuscripts, letters, and other documents, EarlyPrint provides digital images of texts in addition to legible transcriptions of each entry. Moreover, these transcriptions provide researchers the ability to linguistically analyze a large corpus of material which is otherwise difficult to access. Finally, EarlyPrint features a collaborative annotation tool to “offer corrections of the most common forms of textual corruption in the transcriptions.”

Hosted by a partnership between Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis, EarlyPrint has been curated by several scholars, librarians, and students led by Martin Mueller (professor at Northwestern) and Joseph Loewenstein (professor at Washington University). Funding for the project has come from both universities and several grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). A clear start and end date is not provided by the project website, but the front page notes that “work to correct textual defects and improve morphological identification is ongoing.” The Library Application Release History page, however, notes that the last software update was in 2023 and dates back to 2016.

Ultimately, the project seeks to utilize and improve upon pre-existing digital archives that specialize in early English books, notably Early English Books Online (EEBO), EighteenthCentury Collections Online (ECCO), and the Evans-TCP transcriptions of early American imprints. In coordination with the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), EarlyPrint seeks to create a “complex digital surrogate for almost every book before 1700” by 1) providing free and improved digital images, 2) providing an accessible method to fix flawed transcriptions, and 3) providing more detailed metadata to make texts more “computationally tractable.”