A range of electronic corpora is increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improved standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book looks at developing similar standards for enriching and preserving unconventional data: dialects, child language and bilingual databases.

This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. Its specific focus is on best practices identified in the exploitation of these resources in landmark impact initiatives across different parts of the globe. The development of increasingly accessible digital corpora has coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collection, encoding and archiving of ‘Big Data’. Less attention has been paid to the importance of developing standards for enriching and preserving other types of corpus data, such as that which captures the nuances of regional dialects, for example. This book takes these best practices another step forward by addressing innovative methods for enhancing and exploiting specialized corpora so that they become accessible to wider audiences beyond the academy.

This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. Its specific focus is on best practices identified in the exploitation of these resources in landmark impact initiatives across different parts of the globe. The development of increasingly accessible digital corpora has coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collection, encoding and archiving of ‘Big Data’. Less attention has been paid to the importance of developing standards for enriching and preserving other types of corpus data, such as that which captures the nuances of regional dialects, for example. This book takes these best practices another step forward by addressing innovative methods for enhancing and exploiting specialized corpora so that they become accessible to wider audiences beyond the academy.

A range of electronic corpora has become accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This coincides with improvements in standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book develops similar standards for enriching and preserving 'unconventional' data': the fragmentary texts and voices left to us as accidents of history.