Abstract
This chapter deals with the fundamentals of corpus compilation, approached from a practical perspective. The topics covered follow the key phases of corpus compilation, starting with the initial considerations of representativeness and balance. Next, issues in collecting corpus data are covered, including ethics and metadata. Technical aspects involving formatting and annotation are then presented, followed by suggestions for sharing the corpus with others. Corpus comparison is also discussed, as it merits some reflection when a corpus is created. To further illustrate key concepts and exemplify the varying roles of the corpus in specific research projects, two sample studies are presented. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of future directions in corpus compilation, focusing on the importance of compensating for the inevitable loss of complex information and taking the increasingly multimodal nature of discourse as a case in point.
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Notes
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- 2.
Biber (1993:244) defines a sampling frame as “an operational definition of the population, an itemized listing of population members from which a representative sample can be chosen”.
- 3.
There are tools that automatically convert pdf files to simple text, such as AntFileConverter http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antfileconverter/. Accessed 24 May 2019.
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Fair use is measured through the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use on the potential market. For more information, see https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/. Accessed 24 May 2019.
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For sample templates, see the forms from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Bas/BasTemplateInformedConsent_en.pdf, or Newcastle University at https://www.ncl.ac.uk/media/wwwnclacuk/research/files/Example%20Consent%20Form.pdf. Accessed 29 May 2019.
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See https://baalweb.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/goodpractice_full_2016.pdf. Accessed 24 May 2019.
- 7.
See http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/ (Accessed 24 May 2019) and https://web.archive.org/web/20130302203713/http://micase.elicorpora.info/files/0000/0015/MICASE_MANUAL.pdf (Accessed 24 May 2019).
- 8.
See https://tei-c.org/. Accessed 24 May 2019.
- 9.
See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/. Accessed 24 May 2019.
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See https://ota.ox.ac.uk/ (Accessed 24 May 2019) and https://www.clarin-d.net/en/corpora (Accessed 24 May 2019).
- 11.
A similar example is reported on in Chap. 8 on analyzing concordances and involves a study of how foreign doctors are represented in a corpus of British press articles.
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Further Reading
Further Reading
Biber, D. 1993. Representativeness in Corpus Design. Literary and Linguistic Computing 8(4): 243–257.
Biber’s work is significant not only in having had quite an impact on the field, but also in its attempt to develop empirical methods for evaluating corpus representativeness.
Wynne, M. (Editor). 2005. Develo** Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice . Oxford: Oxbow Books. http://ota.ox.ac.uk/documents/creating/dlc/ .
There is a surprising dearth of reference works on corpus compilation. Even if thiscollection of chapters is not recent, it is still worth reading.
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Ädel, A. (2020). Corpus Compilation. In: Paquot, M., Gries, S.T. (eds) A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46216-1_1
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