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

[Hardie, Andrew]

Alan,
 
Try googling the following:
 
developmental psychology
quantum physics
critical theory
mediaeval history
evolutionary biology

To my (uninformed) eyes, the situation on the first page or two of
results for each of these does not seem much better than what you
describe. But is it really news to anyone that good introductory
information on an academic field is hard to find by simply punching the
name of the field into Google? 
 
As a point of fact, there is not just one "general site which helps
people find their way", there are actually quite a few; the fact that
they aren't right at the top of the Google results for  "corpus
linguistics" cannot exactly be blamed on the people who created them.
Many are in fact linked from the Intute links lindex which is itself on
pg 2 of the Google search (and a couple are linked from the "sources"
section of the [almost completely inaccurate] Wikipedia article that is
of course the #1 result).
 
Also on the Google result (first four pages), we get, amongst others:
 
The McEnery-Wilson textbook
The Biber-Conrad-Reppen textbook
The Corpus Linguistics 2011 conference
The Univ. Michigan ELI researchers' site
The John Benjamins page for IJCL
An overview page at Univ. Essex
The Sampson-McCarthy volume of classic papers
The BAAL SIG
The Corpus Linguistics 2009 conference
The Degruyter page for CLLT
The Renouf-Kehoe volume of papers from ICAME28
The Meyer textbook
The Birmingham Centre for Corpus Research
A page at Mike Scott's site
The Routledge handbook
The LLAS good practice guide article
 
Actually, that doesn't seem such a bad indication of current activity in
corpus linguistics to me...
 
best
 
Andrew Hardie
Linguistics & English Language
County South
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YL
United Kingdom
 
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/hardie
 


________________________________

	From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On
Behalf Of Alan Hogue
	Sent: 09 October 2010 09:59
	To: corpora at uib.no
	Subject: [Corpora-List] Where is corpus linguistics on the web?
	
	
	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
	


_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora