Astronomy "playne and simple"the writing of science between 1700 and 1900

Resumen

The Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA) is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). CETA has been compiled for the description of English Astronomy writing between 1700 and 1900, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Since the CC was designed in 2003 with a sampling method by which extracts of 10,000 words were selected, this method has been followed in CETA, with samples from 42 different authors both from Europe and North America. Some extralinguistic parameters, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres have been considered for text selection. According to late Modern English text typology, the samples in CETA can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as some other metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. CETA is released on CD-Rom with Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT), purpose-designed software by IrLab. It is accompanied by the volume Astronomy ‘playne and simple’, which includes descriptions of some of the texts compiled in CETA, together with a number of pilot studies using these texts.