Hello! Tumblr isn't giving me the option to ask this from the relevant sideblog (@thejoyofseax), so excuse the confusion. I'm a food historian, working on pre-Norman Irish foodways. One of the weird issues I'm arriving at is that I can find very little archaeological evidence of cooking vessels between about 600 BCE and 800 CE. I'm starting to look at references to such vessels in text instead, but, well, you know yourself what the searchability of Irish texts is like. In the first instance, where and how do you go about searching the actual corpus of texts? And second, are any references to cauldrons (coire, or maybe coirén), in particular, arising in your texts?
Ah, yes, I've seen you posting about this before. What a strange little gap that one is in the archaeological record.
First, the methodology in general:
Searching the corpus of medieval Irish texts is... ha. Yeah. A problem. I'm assuming you've probably seen my intensely colourful spreadsheet of terminology used for relationships in the later Ulster Cycle. That was produced by personally reading each text and manually making note of every term that they used. Sometimes I had to personally check them in manuscript form because the editions were too unreliable. There were two main reasons for this:
Some of these texts are not digitised at all, so I only had access to a physical copy, or a badly OCR'd scan that wasn't meaningfully searchable. The only way to find words was to read it with my eyeballs.
Even when the texts are digitised, non-standardised spellings mean it's extremely hard to predict the form in which a word might appear, and it's easy to miss one because it was spelled strangely or was interrupted by editorial punctuation (brackets etc) and didn't show up in any digital searches. I couldn't trust a CTRL+F to actually find the words I needed, even when they were fully searchable.
(I mean, it was also a useful process and helped me refine my understanding and get to know the texts better. But if there had been an easy and reliable way to do it, I can't say I'd have chosen the hard way purely for that reason.)
And that was with a corpus where I had the texts first and was looking for the words afterwards. Looking for the word when you don't know which texts it's in would be... worse. I mean, you can go through each text on CELT individual with CTRL+F and try all the spelling variations you can think of, that's probably the easiest way to do that, but it would be pretty slow going to do each text one by one, and it would only get you the texts that are on there. Plus, I assume you've tried that. It may be possible if you know how to use more complex search terms to search the entire site from outside it, but I don't know how one would do that; I've never tried. And doesn't change the issue that your corpus is still restricted to what's on there.
@ad-ciu has been doing some more extensive corpus work to pull out names of characters and create a database of those for reference, so might have suggestions on how to do that, but I think it still largely requires you to do one text at a time and to start with your text rather than start with your word.
However, for these purposes specifically and for word-first searches more generally:
Have you tried using eDIL? If you go to the entry for coire, it shows you many of the texts in which it's attested, and you could then follow up on those references and find out the context. You can click on each abbreviated reference and find out where it is (this is sometimes easier than other times, as sometimes they're edited in a series and the reference can be a bit vague):
So we can see here that the word is in Sanas Cormaic as it appears in the Yellow Book of Lecan, and that Meyer edited this in Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts IV, and it looks like the word is probably on page 128 (or maybe it's chapter xx and line 128? Or some other combination of numbers? You'd probably work out which was more likely pretty fast upon looking at Anecdota; I can't remember how it's formatted).
It won't have every single attestation of the word in every single text, obviously, but if you haven't already taken this approach, it might be a good place to start.
I haven't particularly noticed the term in my texts, but my focus texts are very late (14th-17th century is my main focus currently), so on a material culture level I'm not sure they'd be so useful to you anyway. Very much post-Norman in composition, and don't get me started on how late the manuscripts are! Obviously, pretty much all our texts are going to post-date your period, but not all of them as much as that. I will say that the only description of food being cooked in Oidheadh Con Culainn involves the meat on spits and a cooking-pit (fulacht), no cauldron, if that's any use.
