Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora

"This collection is a rich treasure trove brimming with new ideas aimed at facilitating and promoting public engagement with linguistic corpora. By extending the utility of such corpora beyond academe, its wide-ranging contents will be of interest to a broad audience, including linguists, teachers, archivists and historians." (Stephen Levey, Associate Professor, University of Ottawa, USA) "This book is unique in reporting what data collections mean to the speech communities that have cooperated in their creation and how corpus research supports important applications, including public relations, education, forensics and speech coaching." (John Nerbonne, Professor of Humanities Computing, University of Groningen, the Netherlands) "At last! A volume on linguistic corpora that successfully mediates our theoretical research interests and our obligation to contribute to schools, courts, museums, workplaces and other institutions in which language lives." (John R. Rickford, J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities, Stanford University, USA)

This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. 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.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.