[Corpora-List] Where is corpus linguistics on the web?

[Alan Hogue]

Hello,

I am pretty new to corpus linguistics. I have a fair amount of experience in
general programming, and* *I am a 3rd year grad student in linguistics. I
have embarked on a research project which requires corpora. Since then, I
have been surprised at the (as far as I can tell) complete lack of good,
reliable web presence of the corpus linguistics community.

Looking at what I can find on the web, I would have to conclude that corpus
linguistics is a dead discipline. I know that is certainly not true, so I
wonder why it looks that way. If you haven't recently, google "corpus
linguistics".

I mostly see book listings and a few mailing lists.

Shouldn't there be at least one general site which helps people find their
way?

Or, and forgive me, but this was particularly irritating to me, try looking
at the websites of virtually any corpus, and see how long it takes you to
find solid information about the type of annotation employed. Even something
as simple as this. Maybe I am just not looking hard enough, this sort of
essential information is perversely hard to find on many sites, as far as I
can tell.

My question to all of you is simply Why? If corpus linguistics is such a
vibrant field, why is it so damn hard to find what people (perhaps not
die-hard corpus linguists) need to find? Why should the Penn Treebank and
others like it have no reasonably documented query software? Why can't you
easily find corpora of a particular kind online?

To put it simply, it seems to me there is no infrastructure here.

I have heard over and over again that this is the future of linguistics, and
I would agree. So why is there no presence on the web? Are we stuck in the
newsgroup dark ages? What's going on here? Honestly, I'd really like to
know.

And if I have somehow got everything wrong, then I'd love to be
enlightened.

Sincerely,
Alan Hogue


-- 
"A good traveler has no fixed plans
 and is not intent on arriving."

-Lao Tzu
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