[Corpora-List] Announcement: Online Launch of Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS)

[Dr Wendy Anderson]

Announcement: Online Launch of Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS)

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech project (SCOTS) has launched its
online corpus - on St Andrew's Day, 30th November 2004. This new resource,
which is freely and publicly available, captures the languages of Scotland,
by bringing together written, spoken, audio and video texts. Initially we
are making available close to 400 texts, around half a million words in
total, ranging from Broad Scots to Scottish English. SCOTS already contains
a wide variety of types of text: prose, poetry, drama, essays,
correspondence, business writing. Audio and video material comes complete
with transcriptions, and access to the original sound or video. All of the
texts are accompanied by comprehensive sociolinguistic information about the
text itself and its author.

To find out more about the SCOTS project or to browse or search the corpus,
please visit the project website at www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk. The corpus
itself will be accessible from this site from 30th November. SCOTS is an
ongoing project, and to give as accurate a picture as possible of the
languages of Scotland, we need more texts. We encourage anyone who might be
able to contribute to the resource by donating texts (either written or
spoken) to contact us, by email or through the website.

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) is a venture by the
Department of English Language and STELLA project at the University of
Glasgow. The first stage of the project was grant-funded by the Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council; the current three-year stage is
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (www.ahrb.ac.uk). The AHRB
funds postgraduate training and research in the arts and humanities, from
archaeology and English literature to design and dance. The quality and
range of research supported not only provides social and cultural benefits
but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.  For further
information on the AHRB, please see www.ahrb.ac.uk

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Dr Wendy J. Anderson
Research Assistant
Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech
Department of English Language
University of Glasgow
12 University Gardens
Glasgow
G12 8QQ
Scotland, UK

Website: http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk