A Linguistic 'Time Capsule' for the Google Generation: The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English

自20世纪中叶以来，信息技术在人类活动的大多数领域日益广泛地使用，促进并继续以巨大的规模产生数字电子自然语言文本/音频/图形。艺术与人文(A&H)研究从中受益，因为可供研究的此类材料的数量大大增加。此外，统计、信息检索和数据挖掘等其他领域也为分析/解释从这些A&H资源中提取的数据提供了计算工具。IT与相关主题领域对A&H研究的影响的一个主要方面是通过将遗留材料数字化或将这些材料与新材料合成来创建特定于学科的集合。经过几十年的活动，这类藏品在英国和世界范围内的数量都非常大，没有丝毫减少的迹象。随着特定领域馆藏数量的增长，出现了与保存/再利用这类资源有关的各种概念/技术问题。AHRC的DEDEFI呼吁重点关注其中两个问题：(I)鉴于这些藏品通常是在学术环境中产生的，供学术使用，并由公共资助机构提供资源，如何确保它们的寿命，以便不浪费在它们身上的财力/人力投资，即如何使它们可持续？(Ii)如何将这些藏品的潜力从高等教育扩展到学校/博物馆和普通公众，即它们如何能够产生更大的社会影响？本申请针对现有的AHRC资助的藏品解决这两个问题，《纽卡斯尔泰恩赛德英语电子语料库》(http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte).NECTE将泰恩赛德英语的两个遗留数据库--“泰恩赛德语言调查”和“当代英语口语中的语音变异和变化”项目合并为一个单一的资源。这一进程符合这类数据的文件编制/数字化的全球标准，是利用现有的最新信息技术进行的。NECTE的主要目的是作为学术语言/社会历史研究的资源。自2005年在网络上发表以来，它的创造者和其他研究人员都广泛使用了它。该提案旨在以增强其可持续性和影响力的方式发展NECTE。总而言之，目标是在几个方面增加语料库的内容&创建一个新的网站，取代现有的网站，使学术/非学术用户以适合这些社区的方式更容易获取内容。加强工作包括更新当前的全球文件标准，将语料库与最近收集/数字化的泰恩赛德语言(2007年至2009年)以及来自Beamish(http://www.beamishcollections.com/rrc/photo.asp)，北部地区电影电视档案馆(http://www.nrfta.org.uk/)&泰恩和佩尔博物馆和档案馆(http://www.tyneandweararchives.org.uk/).For学术用户))收藏的数字化照片材料联系起来，新网站提供的下载设施和文件基本上与现有NECTE网站的下载设施和文件相同，虽然后者将进行更新，以反映新的标准&对已经描述的内容的改变。对于非学术用户(特别是教育/博物馆部门的用户)，该网站提供基于主题的资源浏览，因此，选择不同的菜单将向用户显示链接的音频/文本/图片数据。通过这样做，我们将迎接保存/提高语言‘时间胶囊’的价值的挑战，即通过使用最先进的技术来适应‘谷歌一代’相当独特的网络搜索行为和需求(Kuiper等人。2008年；尼古拉斯和罗兰兹律师事务所，2008年)。

The increasingly widespread use of Information Technology (IT) in most spheres of human activity since the mid-20th century has facilitated & continues to generate digital electronic natural language text/audio/graphics on a huge scale. Arts & Humanities (A&H) research has benefitted from this in that the volume of such materials available for study has greatly increased. Moreover, other fields like Statistics, Information Retrieval & Data Mining have provided computational tools for analysis/interpretation of data abstracted from these A&H resources. A major aspect of the impact of IT & allied subject areas on A&H research has been the creation of discipline-specific collections via digitisation of legacy materials or synthesis of these with new ones. After several decades' activity, the volume of such collections both in the UK & worldwide is both very large & showing no sign of receding. As the number of domain-specific collections has grown, a variety of conceptual/technical issues having to do with the preservation/re-use of such resources have arisen. The AHRC's DEDEFI call focuses on two of them: (i) Given that such collections are typically generated in academic environments for academic use & resourced by public funding bodies, how can one ensure their longevity so that the financial/human investment in them is not wasted, i.e. how can they be made sustainable?(ii) How can the potential of the collections be extended beyond HE to schools/museums & to the general public, that is, how can they achieve even greater social impact?The present application addresses these two issues with respect to an existing AHRC-funded collection, the 'Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English' (NECTE) (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte). NECTE amalgamated two legacy databases of Tyneside English, the 'Tyneside Linguistic Survey' & the 'Phonological Variation & Change in Contemporary Spoken English' project, into a single resource. This process conformed to global standards for the documentation/digitisation of such data & was undertaken using the latest IT technology available. NECTE was intended primarily as a resource for academic linguistic/socio-historical research. Since its publication on the Web in 2005, it has been extensively used both by its creators & by other researchers for that purpose. This proposal aims to develop NECTE in ways that enhance both its sustainability and impact. In overview, the objective is to augment the corpus content in several respects & to create a new website that supersedes the existing one & makes the content more accessible to academic/non-academic users in ways appropriate to these respective communities. The augmentation comprises updating to the current global documentation standards, linking the corpus with recently collected/digitised Tyneside speech (2007-2009) as well as digitized photographic materials from collections at Beamish (http://www.beamishcollections.com/rrc/photo.asp), the Northern Region Film & TV Archive (http://www.nrfta.org.uk/) & Tyne & Wear Museums & Archives (http://www.tyneandweararchives.org.uk/).For academic users, the new website offers download facilities & documentation that are essentially identical to those of the existing NECTE website, though the latter would be updated to reflect new standards & the changes to the content already described. For non-academic users (especially those in the educational/museum sectors), the website offers topic-based browsing of the resource such that, selecting different menus will present the user with linked audio/text/photographic data. By doing so, we will meet the challenge of preserving/enhancing the value of the Linguistic 'Time Capsule' that is NECTE by using state-of-the-art technologies to accommodate the quite distinctive web searching behaviours & demands of the 'Google Generation' (Kuiper et al. 2008;Nicholas & Rowlands 2008).