[Corpora-List] Do we still need language corpora?

[Alex BOULTON]

Dear all 

Thanks Martin for opening this up, I'm sure there are lots of people who do use the web and feel a built guilty about it... Ah, the snobbery on both sides! Webbies: mine's bigger than yours; corpies: but look what I can do with mine. 

Surely it all depends on what you want to put in and what you want to get out. For the purposes of language teaching & learning, for example (I can hear the groans already), teachers and learners may not be able to invest very much time in creating corpora or mastering the tools and interfaces available (even fairly simple ones), at least in initial stages. Since they're using Google anyway, maybe showing them how to get the most out of that could be a useful first step, which might lead on to using eg WebCorp or KWicFinder, to SketchEngine & BootCAT, to CoCA and the BNC, to AntConc and WordSmith Tools - which is not a bad potential progression for non-linguists (though not necessarily in that order - and certainly not an exhaustive list). Any way in which is unthreatening and is immediately useful must be better than no way in at all (or than a way in that's completely off-putting). 

Inevitably, if you're working with one you're likely only to see the advantages compared to the disadvantages of the other. So yes, there is definitely debate to be continued! 

Best 
alex 
PS Currently working on just this topic for the EuroCALL conference in Nottingham in Aug/Sep. 


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Alex Boulton 

Nancy-Université 



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----- Mail original -----
De: "Martin Wynne" <martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk> 
À: corpora at uib.no 
Envoyé: Jeudi 3 Février 2011 17:43:09 
Objet: [Corpora-List] Do we still need language corpora? 

Do we still need language corpora? Is the selection and preparation of 
the carefully crafted corpus a waste of time and money these days when 
large amounts of language data are freely available on the web? 

If you are interested in this question then come along to a debate, 
organised by Martin Wynne and Ylva Berglund (Oxford) on the afternoon of 
June 1st 2011, and as a pre-conference event at the ICAME conference in 
Oslo. 

More details are available at: 

http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/conferences/2011/icame2011/workshops.html 

The session will be a formal debate, with two speakers for and two 
against the motion, with the opportunity for questions from the floor, 
and a summing up by the speakers, ending with a vote by the audience. 
The motion will be: 

"Language corpora are no longer necessary for linguistic research." 

All participants in the ICAME conference are warmly encouraged to come 
along and participate in what promises to be an entertaining and 
important debate on a key question confronting corpus linguistics today. 

Time and place 

The workshop will be held in the afternoon between 14.00 and 16.00 on 
Wednesday 1 June at the conference hotel and main venue, the Clarion 
Royal Christiania Hotel, located in Oslo city centre. After the 
workshop, the conference proper will start at 17.00 with the opening 
plenary by David Crystal in the Old Ceremonial Theatre of the University 
of Oslo (also in the city centre). Participants are required to register 
for the main conference, but attendance at the workshops is free. Please 
indicate on the registration form if you intend to attend the 
conference. The conference website is at: 

http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/conferences/2011/icame2011/index.html 

Discussion of the proposition is also welcome on this list! 

-- 
Martin Wynne 
Research Technologies Service& 
Oxford e-Research Centre 

Oxford University Computing Services 
7-19 Banbury Road 
Oxford 
UK - OX2 6NN 
Tel: +44 1865 283299 or +44 1865 610677 
Fax: +44 1865 273275 
martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk 


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