The Tycho Brahe Corpus: contributions for the digital humanities in Brazil

Abstract

The confluence between philology and computation in Portuguese historical linguistics, in process since the 1990s, is now an expanding horizon, making this a good moment for the reflection about the transformations produced by computational technologies on traditional philological and linguistic work . This paper proposes to reflect on this, starting with a detailed exploration of the text technologies used in the Tycho Brahe Corpus of Historical Portuguese, and examining the combinations of philological, linguistic and computational procedures involved in its construction. We approach electronic corpora as databases about texts, rather than collections of texts; and this allows us to envisage the particularities involved in work with digital media in philology and linguistics. We try to start debate on the challenges and perspectives opened to these fields in Brazil, after the considerations on the pioneer projects described.