-----forwarded message----- The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) has published a new Guide to Good Practice, 'Developing Linguistic Corpora'. It is edited by Martin Wynne from the Literature, Languages and Linguistics branch of the AHDS, which is hosted by the Oxford Text Archive.

The printed book can be ordered online from Oxbow Books (http://www.oxbowbooks.com/) for £15 plus post and packing, and the full text is available for free online at http://ahds.ac.uk/linguistic-corpora/

In this volume, a selection of leading experts offer advice to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well-designed and fit for the intended purpose.

As John Sinclair writes in the first chapter: "A corpus is a remarkable thing, not so much because it is a collection of language text, but because of the properties that it acquires if it is well-designed and carefully-constructed."

The collection includes the following chapters:

* 'Corpus and text: basic principles' by John Sinclair * 'Adding linguistic annotation' by Geoffrey Leech * 'Metadata for corpus work' by Lou Burnard * 'Character encoding in corpus construction' by Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao * 'Spoken language corpora' by Paul Thompson * 'Archiving, distribution and preservation' by Martin Wynne

John Sinclair sets out ten principles for corpus design, plus a new definition of a corpus. Geoffrey Leech offers a taxonomy of types of annotations as well as clear guidelines and some provisional standards for annotation at various linguistic levels. Lou Burnard explains the different types of metadata which can be provided for a corpus, and gives examples of how these can be implemented using the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao take on the tricky issue of encoding characters in languages other than English, giving an historical overview of the various solutions, leading to a discussion of how to use Unicode today in encoding corpus texts. Paul Thompson draws on his experience in developing the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus to set out the stages involved in the development and exploitation of a corpus of speech, covering data collection, transcription, markup and annotation, and access. In chapter six, Martin Wynne explains how good planning and design can help to ensure the ongoing availability and usefulness of a corpus.

This and other guides in the series are available from http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/

Alastair

Alastair Dunning Arts and Humanities Data Service http://ahds.ac.uk/ King's College London 0207 848 1972