Taming Digital Voices and Texts: Models and Methods for Handling Unconventional Diachronic Corpora

Four of the contributions to Volume 2 (Allen, Beal, Corrigan, Maguire and Moisl; Standen and Jones; Meurman-Solin; and Raumolin- Brunberg and Nevalainen) arose from invited presentations at the workshop on ‘Models and Methods in the Handling of Unconventional Digital Corpora’ organized by the editors of the present volume that was held in April 2004 during the Fifteenth Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS15) at Newcastle University. The book project then evolved by inviting further contributions from key corpus creators so that the companion volumes would contain treatments outlining the models and methods underpinning a variety of digitized diachronic and synchronic corpora with a view to highlighting synergies and points of contrast between them. The overarching aim of the project is to establish whether or not annotation standards and guidelines of the kind already employed in the creation of more conventional corpora on standard spoken and written Englishes, such as the British National Corpus (http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc) and the Bank of English (http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/boe_info.html), should be extended to less conventional corpora so that they too might be ‘tamed’ in similar ways.