Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness

[Geoffrey Williams]

Just to add my penny's worth.

I suppose one of the problems of sloppiness comes from our past experience 
with email. Like a lot of people I started out on a UNIX workstation, so 
when writing in French I could not use diacritics, even if I had wanted to. 
As the use of email spread to the administration and the arts department we 
all got used to unreadable emails. MIME changed this, although only 
gradually as some of us remained on outdated workstations long after the 
arts department had been equipped with new computers. The result is that 
some of us remain nervous as to what we are sending, and therefore tend to 
remain in basic ASCII. I am not sure that our failure to readapt after what 
was a pragmatic, and not a sloppy choice, counts as sloppiness.

Diacritics remain a problem. In teaching corpus linguistics, one of my 
first problems is explaining the inherent problem of "unstable" characters 
as the ease of use of current technology has masked the underlying markup. 
In such cases a  little bit of knowledge of computing prehistory does help.

best

Geoffrey

PS In French I admit to my incompetence being more a problem than 
sloppiness. Laziness for a two-finger typist is also a factor, especially 
when using upper case characters.
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Geoffrey Clive Williams
Langues Etrangères Appliquées
Université de Bretagne Sud
4 rue Jean Zay
56000 LORIENT

Geoffrey.Williams at univ-ubs.fr
http://www.univ-ubs.fr/crellic

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