Investigating the history of a language depends on fragmentary sources, but electronic corpora offer the possibility of alleviating the problem of ‘bad data’. However they cannot overcome it totally, and crucial questions thus arise of the optimal architecture for such a corpus, the problem of how representative even a large corpus can be of actual language use at a particular time, and how a historical corpus can best be annotated and provided with tools to maximize its usefulness as a resource for future researchers.
Immense strides have been made in recent years in addressing these questions, with exciting new methods and technological advances. The papers in this volume, which were presented at a conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora (Manchester 2011), exemplify the range of these developments in investigating the diachrony of languages as distinct as English, German, Latin, Spanish, French and Slovene and developing appropriate tools for the analysis of historical corpora in these languages.

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