Corpora: dialect

[Ilka Mindt]

Dear corpus linguists,

on behalf of a PhD-student who wants to work on the graphemic realisation
of dialects of the English Midlands in texts (fiction or non-fiction) I
have the following questions:

Does anybody know of ongoing/completed research in the field of the
graphemic/orthographic representation of dialects (any dialect, Midlands)?

Are there any corpora/text-collections available which include texts from
dialects spoken in the Midlands (the text should be a written
representation of the spoken dialect using "normal" spelling)?

Any suggestions are welcome!

Ilka Mindt
mindt at mail.uni-wuerzburg.de