[Corpora-List] News about the British National Corpus

[Martin Wynne]

In 2014 there will be some changes in the way that the British National 
Corpus (BNC) is distributed.

It is now possible to download the British National Corpus at no cost 
from the Oxford Text Archive at the following URL:

http://www.ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2554

BNC Baby, a 4-million word sample of the BNC is also available:

http://www.ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2553

Click on the 'apply for approval' link to request a copy. The BNC 
continues to be subject to the same user licence conditions, which can 
be viewed athttp://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/licence.html. If you have 
already paid for permission to use the BNC, you should consider that 
this continues to be valid in perpetuity.

There is an even simpler download option if you have a login ID from a 
UK or eduGAIN Shibboleth identity provider (usually, this applies to all 
members of UK universities, and many European institutions). You can 
follow the links at the locations above to download the corpus directly 
without applying for approval. We hope that this facility will soon be 
extended to users from other countries who participate in the CLARIN 
Federation.

It will remain possible to order the BNC on disks from the University of 
Oxford until the end of March 2014, with the current administrative 
charges still applying, from the following URL:

http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/category.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=1049

As part of this process, I have to announce that the University of 
Oxford can no longer offer any support for the XAIRA software, which has 
for many years been made available with the corpus. We have tried to 
offer support on a 'best efforts' basis in recent years, but we do not 
have the resources or expertise to help with the installation or use of 
XAIRA on the latest hardware and software. Users of XAIRA are encouraged 
to visit http://xaira.sourceforge.net/ and check out the forums and 
mailing lists which you will find there. The future of XAIRA depends on 
a committed user community, so please get involved if you have questions 
or can contribute expertise.

There are excellent services offering instant online access to the BNC, 
such as those listed at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/. I am convinced 
that there is still further potential for the integration and use of the 
corpus in online services and web applications. There are plans to 
integrate access to the BNC with the emerging CLARIN infrastructure, 
enabling a range of applications and web services to be used in 
conjunction with this and many other corpora. See http://www.clarin.eu/ 
for more details.

If you know of other ways of using the BNC, or have any more ideas about 
its future, I would welcome a discussion on this email list, or email me.

See this message at my blog: 
http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/martinw/2014/01/13/changes-to-the-distribution-of-the-british-national-corpus/

-- 
Martin Wynne
IT Services, University of Oxford
Oxford e-Research Centre
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
Director of User Involvement, CLARIN ERIC

martin.wynne at it.ox.ac.uk


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