A Linguistic Time-Capsule for the Google Generation: The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English
From October 2010 to October 2011
Project Leader(s): Professor Karen Corrigan
Staff: Dr Isabelle Buchstaller, Dr Adam Mearns, Dr Hermann Moisl
Contact: Karen Corrigan
Sponsors: Arts and Humanities Research Council
Homepage: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/
The principal aims of this research programme funded by the AHRC’s DEDEFI scheme are (i) to ensure that the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) is updated so that it has the greatest chance of longer-term preservation / sustainability, and (ii) to expand the accessibility / impact of NECTE so that new audiences can engage with it. In order of priority, the particular objectives of the enhanced corpus, to be known as the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) are:
• To creatively use integrated, multi-media technologies to present DECTE to the wider public via educational and museum outlets. This will involve linking NECTE, established via an AHRC resource enhancement award, with NECTE2, a new resource of similar audio / text files collected since 2007 as part of an ongoing teaching and learning initiative funded by the Centre for Research in Language and Linguistics at Newcastle. NECTE2 uses an identical methodology to that underpinning NECTE, and linking the two as DECTE will thus create a monitor corpus with the possibility of augmenting the resource by between 80 and 120 audio/text files annually. The visual element of DECTE will be completed in collaboration with our project partners Beamish Museum and Newcastle Discovery and will also entail working with the keepers of repositories at Amber and the Northern Region Film and Television Archive. The intention here is to find innovative technical solutions for linking their images capturing the urban regeneration of Newcastle from the 1990's as well as the heyday of the local coalmining and shipbuilding industries e.g. with narratives on these topics from the NECTE / NECTE2 corpora. Being able to complete these tasks will also be advantageous to an on-going 2009-2011 JISC-funded initiative known as the ENROLLER (ENhancing RepOsitories for Language & LitErature Researchers) project. NECTE is a contributing repository alongside the Oxford English Dictionary,The Historical Thesaurus of English, The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech, and the Dictionary of the Scots Language. In keeping with a key aim of this call, ENROLLER is addressing the need for interoperability between resources within the English language and literature community which is currently forced to deal with distributed, non-interoperable repositories that are often license protected. This project will create a novel, security-driven access service to these distributed databases. There will also be targeted analysis and collaboration tools provided in a unified framework so as to produce a greatly enhanced research repository of all 5 resources of which DECTE will become a part.
• To prepare enhanced learning resources using the digital corpus. NECTE has been successfully used as a teaching and learning resource at higher education, further education, and secondary school levels. The opportunity to create DECTE as described above would enable us to develop a more suitable interface so that it could be used interactively in museums and schools as well as by teachers and their pupils. Moreover, the addition of visual imagery, in particular, would permit DECTE to also engage primary school children. We aim, therefore, to conduct KT / CPD events on aspects of the new resource as a tool for museum and classroom use aimed at the general public and at all levels of the education sector from primary to higher.
• To update NECTE and devise strategies for simplifying the user interface as well as preserving and sustaining DECTE in the longer term by updating it to the current P5 version of the Text Encoding Initiative standard, and by providing tools for presenting the XML-formatted content in HTML and plain text formats.
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Professor Karen Corrigan
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Dr Hermann Moisl
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