In the School of English we have developed software and gathered collections of texts to support our research. These resources are used by researchers and students, both within the School and internationally.
The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) has developed substantial resources for use in corpus linguistic studies. The most recent generation of these tools makes use of the web as a vast and valuable source of linguistic data:
- WebCorp Live adds layers of refinement on top of conventional web search engines. It allows access to the very latest examples of language use online and enables linguistic analyses of the results.
- WebCorp Linguist’s Search Engine (LSE) goes beyond what is possible with WebCorp Live by building its own large collections of web text. These include the 630 million-word Birmingham Blog Corpus and a series of ‘mini web’ corpora of up to 500 million words designed to sample the wider web. Specialist tools provide meta-textual and linguistic information, such as grammatical tags, collocational preferences, publication date and topic. The RDUES team has also developed a separate interface to WebCorp LSE for use at pre-university level.
- The eMargin project has seen researchers in RDUES expand their work to include literature and other text-based disciplines. eMargin is an online collaborative text annotation tool designed for group work in teaching and research. It enables fine-grained analysis through highlighting, discussion and categorisation of stretches of text down to individual word level.