Creating And Digitizing Language Corpora

This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. Its specific focus is on best practices identified in the exploitation of these resources in landmark impact initiatives across different parts of the globe. The development of increasingly accessible digital corpora has coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collection, encoding and archiving of ‘Big Data’. Less attention has been paid to the importance of developing standards for enriching and preserving other types of corpus data, such as that which captures the nuances of regional dialects, for example. This book takes these best practices another step forward by addressing innovative methods for enhancing and exploiting specialized corpora so that they become accessible to wider audiences beyond the academy.

A range of electronic corpora has become accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This coincides with improvements in standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book develops similar standards for enriching and preserving 'unconventional' data': the fragmentary texts and voices left to us as accidents of history.

This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. Its specific focus is on best practices identified in the exploitation of these resources in landmark impact initiatives across different parts of the globe. The development of increasingly accessible digital corpora has coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collection, encoding and archiving of ‘Big Data’. Less attention has been paid to the importance of developing standards for enriching and preserving other types of corpus data, such as that which captures the nuances of regional dialects, for example. This book takes these best practices another step forward by addressing innovative methods for enhancing and exploiting specialized corpora so that they become accessible to wider audiences beyond the academy.

A range of electronic corpora is increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improved standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book looks at developing similar standards for enriching and preserving unconventional data: dialects, child language and bilingual databases.

A range of electronic corpora has become accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This coincides with improvements in standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book develops similar standards for enriching and preserving 'unconventional' data': the fragmentary texts and voices left to us as accidents of history.

This book aims to provide a micro-level, working model of a methodological approach and practical guidelines for building a corpus, informed by the work on the CorCenCC project (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh). It focuses specifically on the development of detailed design frames for corpora across communicative modes (spoken, written and e-language), and the practical processes involved in the planning, collection, transcription, collation and (re)presentation of language data. The book is designed to be of significant value and relevance to those interested in critically engaging with corpus methodology. Although Welsh is the language under discussion, the processes and approaches discussed in the building of CorCenCC can be applied to a lesser or greater extent to other language contexts. This book provides a working model, and an account of how to build a corpus dataset from which step by step guidelines for creating other linguistic corpora in any language can be easily extrapolated. It will be of value to students and scholars of minority languages and corpus linguistics.