Oxford University's Research Technologies Service is pleased to announce availability of BNC Baby: a new sampler CD designed to demonstrate the full potential of corpus linguistics in the teaching of English language and literature. For more information, please visit our website at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/babyinfo.html
BNC Baby contains three different XML corpora, complete with detailed linguistic analysis and fully TEI-compliant markup. It also includes the latest release of XAIRA (XML Aware Indexing and Retrieval Architecture) - a new software system developed at Oxford specifically for linguistically-motivated text analysis of large XML corpora.
The three corpora are:
- BNC Baby: four one-million word extracts from the British National Corpus, representing mid-20th century informal conversation, academic prose, fiction, and newspapers.
- The Nameless Shakespeare: the complete works of William Shakespeare in a normalized spelling edition prepared at Northwestern and Tufts Universities
- The Brooklyn Corpus of Old English: sixteen major texts of Old English prose made available by the Oxford Text Archive
The software included on the CD can be installed on any machine running Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP, and is supplied with built-in help and links to tutorial materials under development as part of the Xaira project. The software can also be used to index other XML- conformant corpora, of any kind and in any language. Free updates of the software will be made available through the Xaira project, the object of which is to develop an open-source platform-independent toolkit (see http://www.xaira.org for more information about Xaira)
To order your copy, go to http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ordering.html Individual copies of the CD, including despatch by first class mail, cost £21 (€30 or $30), plus VAT within the EU. For orders of ten copies or more, the unit price drops to £7 (€10).
