Designing Australian English

A Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus is being held in Sydney 4-5 December 2008. The aim is to create a collection of Australian English text, inlcuding transcripts of spoken English, similar to the American National Corpus. This data is then used for researching the use of language. However, I have my doubts as to how realistic a "national" corpus is and how well the manual processes currently used to create such collections are. The automated tools used with web search engines would seem to be able to collect far larger volumes of material without the arbitrary "national" label.

As part of SummerFest 2008, to be held at UNSW in the week of December 1st—5th 2008, HCSNet (the ARC Research Network in Human Communication) is organising a workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus

This workshop focuses on current developments and emerging possibilities in corpus construction and usage for researchers working in Human Communication Sciences. Its aim is to bring together researchers with expertise in data representation and corpus building, as well as corpus annotation and interrogation, in a single forum in order (1) to disseminate leading work on corpus construction and usage to the broader research community in Australia and thereby contribute to collective knowledge about data collection and representation, and (2) to work towards the design and construction of an Australian National Corpus that is innovative in exploiting the full potential of the interface between language and technologies. ...

Submissions

Submissions for presentation at the workshop are sought. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• corpus linguistics
• corpus data
• web-based corpora
• linguistic and multimodal data representation
• audio(visual) text transcription
• language documentation
• corpus interrogation
• corpus annotation
• corpus design and construction
• language data ethics
• corpus-based research

From: Designing the Australian National Corpus, 2008