| About the Corpus of Khmer Inscriptions |
| No SEA country's transition to history is better documented than Cambodia. More than 1,200 Khmer and Sanksrit inscriptions have been found across a broad swath of the Mekong delta region. Spanning the 6th to the 19th centuries, they provide first-hand evidence of ancient and medieval Khmer history, culture, language, and art. |
| The tools provided here serve two quite different functions, allowing: |
| - study of the texts that make up the corpus, and |
| - analysis of the corpus as a set of words. |
|
This implementation has limited functionality: texts are incomplete,
have not been fully proofread, and the division into eras and regions
is very rough.
Nevertheless, with some 669 texts comprising nearly a million words, and
integrated tools for collocate search and analysis, even this
demonstration version provides a powerful research tool.
Using the Corpus Tools |
| Indic entry Insert characters as necessary. Note that (digit), (vowel), and (consonant) will replace any single letter in the actual search. |
| Corpus search Return specific items in a context of +/- n words (default 5). Because spelling may vary, the searches exactly, while (vowels), (consonants), and (vowels or consonants) allow plausible substitutions; e.g. a long vowel for a short one. Returned contexts can be ordered by date or inscription number. |
| Collocates / neighbors Collect, count, and display only the immediate collocate, or the nearest neighbors, of any item. Summing the neighbors will is helpful for ignoring intervening modifiers or numbers. |
| Summary distribution Show how a term's frequency varies over the entire corpus. The approximate spelling buttons track variants as well. |
| Corpus restriction / display These controls let one or more texts form a sub-corpus, whose members may be chosen by number, era, origin, etc. Once the sub-corpus has been selected, you may: |
| - search it using the Corpus search tools at the top. |
| - display full texts with the button. |
| - extract a lexicon of all words in all the selected texts. These may be ordered alphabetically, by frequency, or by date of actual appearance. |