Online Appendix for Meaning Variation and Data Quality in the Corpus of Founding Era American English

This page contains online supplementary information for the paper "Meaning Variation and Data Quality in the Corpus of Founding Era American English", published at ACL 2025. (See below for a full citation). There paper is available here.

Abstract

Legal scholars are increasingly using corpus based methods for assessing historical meaning. Among work focused on the so-called founding era (mid to late 18th century), the majority of such studies use the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) and rely on methods such as word counting and manual coding. Here, we demonstrate what can be inferred about meaning change and variation using more advanced NLP methods, focusing on terms in the U.S. Constitution. We also carry out a data quality assessment of COFEA, pointing out issues with OCR quality and metadata, compare diachronic change to synchronic variation, and discuss limitations when using NLP methods for studying historical meaning.

Replication Code

All code used for data processing and analysis is available at https://github.com/dallascard/cofea-analysis.

Interactive Figures

Interactive versions of all figures from the paper are included below, enabling additional exploration of this data.

Figure 1

Figure 1: Number of tokens per year in the six collections that comprise COFEA.
(scroll to zoom; hover for counts)

Figure 2