Humanities Research, Book Digitization, and the Problem of Linguistic Change

The good news is that millions of books have been digitized and are freely available over the Internet. The bad news is also that millions of books have been digitized and are freely available over the Internet. Linguistic change presents one of the greatest hurdles to information retrieval in databases of digitized books because keyword searching of digitized materials does not guarantee discoverability. This article examines the problem of linguistic change in humanities research in full-text databases and describes the innovative solution offered by two proprietary library content providers.