Javier Martín Arista (Professor of English Linguistics) and Ana Elvira Ojanguren López (researcher) from the Universiity of La Rioja conducted the workshop 'Historical Linguistics in the Digital Era' in Vigo on 16 February 2018. The workshop presented some aspects of the new paradigm of Historical Linguistics that result from the two main directions in the discipline: Corpus Linguistics and Digital Humanities. The analysis of large collections of data that are derived from texts and admit several layers of annotation, as well as methods and procedures based on computing and online presentations have provided the historical study of language with aims and means representative of the Digital Era. With this state of play, the workshop discussed three outcomes of linguistic research in Old English carried out with databases: a map of semantic and morphological relations, an interpretation of the big data from the lexicon, and a parallel corpus Old English-Contemporary English. The presentation showed the successive steps from source selection and data retrieval to information interpretation and database compilation. Emphasis was put on the relations between databases and the types of automatisation that such relations permit. In their conclusions, Javier Martín Arista and Ana E. Ojanguren López insisted on the suitability of databases for linguistic research and the compatibility of digital means and research in the Humanities.
