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

[Chris Butler]

Alan, it might be a good idea to start with David Lee's 'Bookmarks for corpus-based linguists', at http://tiny.cc/corpora if you don't already know about this useful resource.

Chris Butler



From: Alan Hogue 
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 9:59 AM
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



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