Institutional collaboration in the creation of digital linguistic resources: the case of the British Telecom correspondence corpus
Institutional collaboration in the creation of digital linguistic resources: the case of the British Telecom correspondence corpus
This chapter discusses the creation of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of letters taken from the public archives of British Telecom (BT) that were written by nearly 400 authors on a wide variety of topics between 1853 and 1982. It first discusses some experiences working on the New Connections project, funded by Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) and a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage, and The National Archives, focusing particularly on the methodological issues encountered. The corpus was created to address a gap in existing corpus resources, and so that researchers (primarily linguists) could access and, crucially, engage with the language of the letters. Since the completion of the BTCC there have been efforts to expand the corpus to include correspondence written to and from the Post Office, an institution with many historical links to BT. This chapter addresses issues surrounding institutional collaboration in both phases of this ongoing research.
Keywords: British Telecom, BT, British Telecom Correspondence Corpus, BTCC, New Connections project, corpus resources, Post Office, institutional collaboration
Policy Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
