---
pretty_name: Málaga Corpus of Late Modern English Scientific Prose (clean Markdown)
language:
- en
license: unknown
task_categories:
- text-generation
tags:
- historical
- late-modern-english
- medicine
- 18th-century
- 19th-century
size_categories:
- n<1K
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/train-*.parquet
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: id
    dtype: string
  - name: title
    dtype: string
  - name: author
    dtype: string
  - name: year
    dtype: int32
  - name: genre
    dtype: string
  - name: period
    dtype: string
  - name: source_tokens
    dtype: int64
  - name: words
    dtype: int64
  - name: paragraphs
    dtype: int64
  - name: corpus
    dtype: string
  - name: corpus_url
    dtype: string
  - name: source_zip
    dtype: string
  - name: source_file
    dtype: string
  - name: source_sha256
    dtype: string
  - name: text
    dtype: string
  - name: file
    dtype: string
  splits:
  - name: train
    num_bytes: 16551181
    num_examples: 55
  download_size: 5801814
  dataset_size: 16551181
---

# Málaga Corpus of Late Modern English Scientific Prose (clean Markdown)

The 55 texts of the Málaga Corpus of Late Modern English Scientific Prose (MCLModESP):
English medical writing, 1703-1896, transcribed from the printed books by the University of
Málaga. The corpus covers theoretical treatises, surgical treatises and remedies (recipes).
This version is the official plain-text corpus with its layout repaired: tags and page
furniture removed, lines joined into paragraphs, and line-end hyphens rejoined. The words,
spelling and punctuation of the transcription are not changed.

55 texts, 2,876,826 words, 33,505 paragraphs. 1,554,316 words date from 1700-1799 and
1,322,510 from 1800-1899.

## Source

- Corpus page: <https://latemodernmss.uma.es/thecorpus/>
- Download used: the plain-text corpus,
  <https://latemodernmss.uma.es/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/PlainTextCorpus.zip> (dated
  2024-11-25). This is the only complete official version: the normalised version has 37 of the
  55 texts and the POS-tagged version has 52.
- The corpus can also be searched online in CQPweb: <https://latemodernmss.uma.es/cqpweb>

The corpus page describes the corpus as "hitherto unedited medical texts produced in the period
1700-1900", with "over 2.5 million words, of which 1.5 million belong to the 18th century and
the other million to the 19th".

## Licence

The corpus page gives no licence, copyright notice or terms of use. The files are a free public
download, and the page asks users to cite the corpus (below). The licence of this dataset is
therefore marked `unknown`. The underlying printed books are from 1703-1896 and are in the public
domain. The transcriptions are the work of the Málaga team. Check with them before commercial use.

## Citation

Please cite the original corpus, as its authors ask:

> Calle-Martín, Javier, Miriam Criado-Peña, Verónica Hernández, Sinéad Linehan-Gómez and Juan
> Lorente-Sánchez. 2016. The Málaga Corpus of Late Modern English Scientific Prose (MCLModESP).
> Málaga: University of Málaga. Available from https://latemodernmss.uma.es.

```bibtex
@misc{mclmodesp2016,
  author       = {Calle-Mart{\'i}n, Javier and Criado-Pe{\~n}a, Miriam and Hern{\'a}ndez, Ver{\'o}nica and Linehan-G{\'o}mez, Sin{\'e}ad and Lorente-S{\'a}nchez, Juan},
  title        = {The M{\'a}laga Corpus of Late Modern English Scientific Prose (MCLModESP)},
  year         = {2016},
  publisher    = {University of M{\'a}laga},
  howpublished = {\url{https://latemodernmss.uma.es}}
}
```

## Files

| Path | What |
|---|---|
| `data/train-00000-of-00001.parquet` | One row per text: the metadata as columns and the Markdown body in `text`. 5.8 MB, zstd. |
| `<period>/<Author, Title (year)>.md` | The same 55 texts as Markdown files with YAML front matter, one folder per quarter century (`1700-1724` ... `1875-1899`). May be shipped as a compressed archive. |

Texts per period: 1700-1724: 7, 1725-1749: 13, 1750-1774: 9, 1775-1799: 6, 1800-1824: 4,
1825-1849: 5, 1850-1874: 4, 1875-1899: 7.

## Columns

The parquet columns are the keys of each Markdown file's YAML front matter, plus `id`, `text`
and `file`. `text` is the body only, without the front matter.

| Column | Type | Content |
|---|---|---|
| `id` | string | `<period>/<Author, Title (year)>` |
| `title` | string | Title, from the source file's `<Title:>` header |
| `author` | string | Author, from `<Author:>`. "Unknown author" or "Unknown Author" (as spelled in the source) where the corpus has none. |
| `year` | int32 | Year of the edition transcribed, from `<Year:>` |
| `genre` | string | From `<Genre:>`: Theoretical (23), Recipes (17), Surgical (13), Recipe book (1, Joanna Stephens 1740). Null for Bryant 1884. |
| `period` | string | Quarter century, as in the corpus folders |
| `source_tokens` | int64 | The corpus's own token count, from `<Tokens:>`. Null for Bryant 1884. |
| `words` | int64 | Letter-and-digit words in `text` |
| `paragraphs` | int64 | Paragraphs in `text` |
| `corpus` | string | Corpus name |
| `corpus_url` | string | Corpus page |
| `source_zip` | string | URL of the official zip |
| `source_file` | string | Path of the source `.txt` inside the zip |
| `source_sha256` | string | SHA-256 of that source `.txt` |
| `text` | string | The text as Markdown: one paragraph per line, blank line between paragraphs |
| `file` | string | Path of the matching `.md` file |

The Bryant 1884 file has no header in the source, so its title, author and year come from its
file name.

```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("parquet", data_files="data/*.parquet", split="train")
print(ds[0]["title"], ds[0]["year"], ds[0]["text"][:200])
```

## How the text was made

From each official plain `.txt` file:

1. Decoding: 54 files are UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, and Bryant 1884 is cp1252. Line ends are
   normalised to LF.
2. Tags removed: the `<Author: ...> <Title: ...> <Year: ...> <Genre: ...> <Tokens: ...>` header
   (kept as metadata) and 59 `<p.N>` page markers in Mead 1720.
3. Page furniture removed at page breaks: 5,030 page numbers, 1,464 running heads, 1,414
   catchwords and 379 signature marks. Eighteenth-century books print the next page's first word
   and a gathering mark such as `B 2` at the foot of each page.
4. Lines joined into paragraphs.
5. Line-end hyphens rejoined ("complica- / tion" → "complication") or kept for compounds
   ("Rose- / water" → "Rose-water"). The decision uses the Málaga team's POS-tagged version of
   the same text first, where it exists, since it already resolves these hyphens. Next it uses word
   counts over the whole corpus. Last, a fallback: two known words keep the hyphen, otherwise
   the parts are joined if the second starts lowercase.
6. Figure captions and footnotes that interrupt a sentence are moved after the paragraph (1,500
   lines).

Check: for every text, the letters and digits of the output, in order, equal those of the
source minus the removed furniture, with moved captions and notes checked separately. All 55
pass.

## Known limits

- Spelling and transcription errors are kept as in the source ("preparpared", "Inflarnation").
- Many 18th-century books mark paragraphs only by indentation, which the transcription does not
  keep, so their paragraphs are long.
- Footnotes that do not interrupt a sentence stay where the transcriber put them.
- A few running heads that occur once, next to a finished sentence, are kept. A few captions stay
  inline where the source joined them to the text.
- The text is not escaped for Markdown. A paragraph starting with a footnote `*` or a number
  renders as a list item.

## Relation to other copies

The Hugging Face dataset `CowFeather/EEBO-Malaga_Coporus` contains 54 of these 55 plain texts,
byte-identical to the official files. It lacks Richard Mead, *Medical Precepts and Cautions*
(1751). Its other 7 files are EEBO texts, not part of this corpus.