About the Corpus

The Scottish Pauper Petition corpus (also called the ScotPP corpus) was created under a research traineeship led by Dr. Moragh Gordon and Dr. Jelena Prokic at Leiden University. The corpus was compiled by Alma Strakova and Hester Groot. The corpus consists of petitions from multiple archives: the Highland Archive Service, the Perth & Kinross Archive, the Mitchell Library, and the Ewart Library.

The petitions were transcribed by using the program Oxygen XML Editor, following some of the Text Encoding Intiative (TEI) standards. The specific tagging system that has been used in the ScotPP corpus has been documented in a manual which can be accessed here.