[Corpora-List] The BootCaT toolkit: Call for contributions and survey announcement

[silvia bernardini]

BootCaTters of the world unite! (BOTWU)
A workshop (and a survey) on the BootCaT toolkit

Initially designed as a set of Unix-based scripts to help trainee 
translators build disposable corpora for specific translation tasks, the 
BootCaT toolkit has gained popularity outside the classroom, becoming 
one of the most widely used tools to build web-derived corpora. Its 
applications have gone way beyond the original purposes for which it was 
built, ranging from the construction of relatively small ad hoc corpora, 
e.g. for lexicographic tasks or for descriptive studies of specialized 
language varieties, to more ambitious research efforts aiming to provide 
large reference corpora for multiple languages. Recently, the potential 
of BootCaT as a research, didactic and professional tool has also been 
boosted by the availability of user-friendly interfaces, which have 
contributed to bringing it closer to the needs of less 
technically-minded users (cf. the web-based version integrated in the 
SketchEngine: http://sketchengine.co.uk/; or the standalone application 
downloadable here: http://bootcat.sslmit.unibo.it/).

==WORKSHOP==

Department of Interpreting and Translation, University of Bologna
Forlì, Italy, 24 June 2013

The BOTWU workshop aims to bring together researchers, students and 
language professionals who have used BootCaT in their work. In so doing, 
we hope to better understand how the tool is used today, as well as 
explore new avenues for its development.

We encourage the submission of short abstracts describing work on 
BootCaT, focusing in particular on (but not limited to) the following 
topics:

- tools that have been or are being developed as extensions of (or 
alternatives to) BootCaT;
- classroom or professional applications;
- innovative, inventive, unusual user experiences;
- the BootCaT of the future/the future of BootCaT: what should be done, 
what can be done.

Abstracts should be between 200 and 300 words (excluding references) and 
must be submitted by email (botwu at sslmit.unibo.it) by **20 May, 2013**. 
Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors by **27 May, 2013**. 
Accepted papers will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation plus 10 
minutes for questions and discussion. A small contribution towards 
travel expenses will be awarded to the author of the most promising 
contribution.

Confirmed speakers who will contribute to the workshop and help us to 
referee proposals include:

Marco Baroni (University of Trento)
Silvia Bernardini (University of Bologna)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexicography MasterClass Ltd)
Nikola Ljubesic (University of Zagreb)
Maja Milicevic (University of Belgrade)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds)
Eros Zanchetta (University of Bologna)

==SURVEY==

We would love to hear from those who have used or are using BootCaT, 
especially those who cannot make it to the BOTWU workshop. We have set 
up a quick survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9YLZB5D

that only takes about 2 minutes to complete (honest).

The survey results will help us to focus on ways to improve the tool, 
and will be made available to the public after the workshop.



For questions (about the workshop or the survey) please contact:

SIlvia Bernardini, silvia.bernardini at unibo.it
Adam Kilgarriff, adam at lexmasterclass.com


_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora