ICAMET - Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts

Acknowledgement:

For allowance to distribute texts of the Innsbruck PROSE CORPUS from published editions in a machine-readable form on CD-ROM I am most obliged to the following publishers: Universit�tsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg (Middle English Texts); James Hogg, Verlag des Instituts f�r Anglistik und Amerikanistik der Universit�t Salzburg; Max Niemeyer Verlag, T�bingen; Oxford University Press, Oxford/England (The Peterborough Chronicle 1070-1154, ed. Cecily Clark, 1958, 2nd ed. 1970); Cambridge University Press; Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm; The University of Leeds, The School of English Language.
The LETTERS of ICAMET have become distributable for scholarly usage by kind permission of the following publishers: Faber & Faber Ltd., London; The Johns Hopkins University Press; The Council of the Early English Text Society; Oxford University Press; Princeton University Press; The University of Tennessee Press; Yale University Press.
It is understood that all the files in this corpus are offered for fair academic use only. 

The MANUAL OF ICAMET appeared recently (April 1999). It describes the three parts of ICAMET in detail: the corpus of Middle English PROSE (with 128 full-text data bases); the corpus of 254 English LETTERS written from 1386 to 1688); and a (less important) collection of various other Middle English and Modern English texts ("VARIA"), mainly translations or normalised versions of Middle English texts. Moreover, the MANUAL gives evidence of the principles of compiling and encoding, and, of course, of the sources of the files. The MANUAL can be ordered from your bookshop or from Universit�t Innsbruck, Institut f�r Anglistik, Innrain 52, 6020 Innsbruck, Fax +512-507-2882 (ISBN 3-85124-163-0; 120 pages; 190 ATS/29 DM/14,50 EU).

As author of the MANUAL I have tried to justify the way in which I have come to terms with the specific, generally underestimated problems posed by Middle English prose texts, and I would wish for some feedback--support, criticism, or suggestions--from fellow corpus linguists and medievalists.

Unfortunately, the uninhibited distribution of the ICAMET texts on the INTERNET is not possible at present, due to copyright restrictions as imposed, in particular, by the Early English Text Society. However, some of the texts of the PROSE CORPUS ("SAMPLER") and all files of the LETTER corpus are herewith made available on CD-ROM. While I am still hopeful that the EETS will give us the licence for distributing all the files of the INNSBRUCK PROSE CORPUS, to the best of the international research community, all those scholars who do not find particular individual texts in the present SAMPLER are invited to consult our departmental Internet page (http://info.uibk.ac.at/c/c6/c609/icamet.html) or our MANUAL for details concerning the unlicenced titles. 

At present, the files are all stored in original MICROSOFT WORD5 for DOS (text-only mode), with the historical signs, such as yogh and eth, to be produced by a special keyboard driver "icamet". This "icamet" driver is available from the path called "icamet" on this CD-ROM. In order to activate this little program, please copy the four files of the driver into your root directory (C:\) and type "icamet", thus causing the batch file to run.


Manfred Markus, Dept. of English, Univ. of Innsbruck, Austria