CANELC: constructing an e-language corpus

Abstract

This paper reports on the construction of the Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus (CANELC). 3 3 This corpus has been built as part of a collaborative project between the University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press with whom sole copyright of the annotated corpus resides. CANELC comprises one-million words of digital English taken from SMS messages, blogs, Tweets, discussion board content and private/business e-mails. Plans to extend the corpus are under discussion. The legal dimension to corpus ‘ownership’ of some forms of unannotated data is a complex one and is under constant review. At present, the annotated corpus is only available to authors and researchers working for CUP and is not more generally available. CANELC is a one-million word corpus of digital communication in English, taken from online discussion boards, blogs, tweets, e-mails and Short Message Services (SMS). The paper outlines the approaches used when planning the corpus: obtaining consent, collecting the data and compiling the corpus database. This is followed by a detailed analysis of some of the patterns of language used in the corpus. The analysis includes a discussion of the key words and phrases used, as well as the common themes and semantic associations connected with the data. These discussions form the basis of an investigation into how e-language operates in ways that are both similar to and different from spoken and written records of communication (as evidenced by the British National Corpus, BNC).