Taming Digital Texts, Voices and Images for the Wild: Models and Methods for Handling Unconventional Corpora to Engage the Public

Abstract

This volume is the third in a series of books published by Palgrave Macmillan which focus on establishing guidelines for the creation and digitization of language corpora that are unconventional in some respect (see Beal et al. 2007a, b). Volume 3 is dedicated to the issue of public engagement and questions of how linguists can and should make their corpora accessible for a broader range of uses and to a wider audience. Although in this regard the road to building a corpus is often paved with good intentions, as Rickford (1993: 130) observes, these are frequently overtaken by ‘the less escapable commitments’ of teaching and further research. While this may be understandable, it is ‘not a picture, when we step back and view it, with which we can be proud’, since it means that ‘[m]ost of us fall short of paying our debts to the communities whose data have helped to build and advance our careers’ (Rickford 1993: 130). The importance of taking public engagement initiatives more seriously has generated considerable recent scholarly debate (especially amongst researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences) as the so-called ‘impact agenda’ has taken hold particularly, though not exclusively, in UK higher education institutions (Lawson and Sayers 2016; Martin 2011; Samuel and Derrick 2015). A key objective of this volume is to examine the evidence for the view that despite the new requirements by funding bodies (and ultimately governments) that corpora should have a dual purpose as data that is deployable for engagement as well as research, twenty-first-century corpus linguists who do just that are not following conventional practices within their discipline. A second goal is to demonstrate how the issues that purportedly stand in the way of developing what one might term ‘impactful corpora’ can be circumvented (as our contributors have done) with a little ingenuity and motivation. Another objective is to sketch what we consider to be best practices in creating corpora for public engagement by offering guidance on optimal methods by which such data (audio, text and still/moving images) can be created, digitized and subsequently exploited for public engagement projects.

The term ‘unconventional’ here relates to the distinction first articulated in Beal et al. (2007a, b) between large-scale standardized or conventional corpora like the International Corpus of English or COBUILD and smaller more specialized databases. These are often not devised at the outset as corpora strictly speaking since they initially arise from sociolinguistically oriented projects, but such resources can indeed be used as such providing they are ‘tamed’ in particular ways (Beal et al. 2007a: 1). See also D’Arcy (2011: 54–6) and Kendall (2011: 362–3).