The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

Abstract

In late 2009 the Corpus Research Group at the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute launched on the web the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). MICUSP Simple, the search and browse interface to the corpus, provides free and immediate access (without need to register) to 829 A-graded papers written by University of Michigan students in their final undergraduate year or in their first three years of graduate educationdhence the label “Upper-level.” The papers have been drawn from 16 disciplines across the four academic divisions of the university, and represent a wide range of text-types or genres. The total number of words stored in the electronic database is around 2.6 million. The URL for the current version of MICUSP is http://search-micusp. elicorpora.info/simple. The MICUSP project website is at http://micusp.elicorpora.info. MICUSP has been designed with a range of users in mind, including corpus linguists, scholars in disciplinary variation, writing instructors, those concerned with English for Academic Purposes, and graduate and undergraduate students, both native speakers of English and speakers of English as an Additional Language. The MICUSP Simple interface features interactive graphs, user-friendly navigation, automatic results update in response to user selection, and full paper view. Initial responses from around the world have been very positive. A number of internal research projects are already under way, one investigating student use of ‘scare quotes’, the other whether students accompany a sentence-initial “This” with a noun phrase or not. On the basis of the successful Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE, see http://micase.elicorpora.info), launched in 2001, we expect MICUSP to be adopted externally for a range of teaching and research purposes, not excluding its use as a source of data for doctoral dissertations. MICUSP has been five years in the making. The original research design was put together by Professor John Swales and Dr Rita Simpson-Vlach in 2004. Then Dr Annelie Adel spearheaded the project; subsequently Dr Ute Romer and Dr Matthew Brook O’Donnell have brought the project to successful completion, aided by considerable numbers of part-time research assistants and interns. The projected next stages of the project will be an enhancement of MICUSP Simple with additional features, and the release of an offline version of the corpus, accompanied by a handbook. Please direct inquiries about the MICUSP project to elicorpora@umich.edu