Welcome to the Baden-Württemberg Digital English Studies Community (BW-DESC)!
This is a resource for users of English-language corpora, including novices, professionals and everyone in-between. Corpora are vital for researching language, but access to them is often hard to come by and using them to their full potential can also present a challenge.
Thus, this website offers free, unlimited access to Mark Davies’ corpora at Brigham Young University (BYU), including the only large and balanced corpora for contemporary and historical American English, for all students and teachers associated with the Universities of Freiburg, Tübingen, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Konstanz, and Stuttgart. If this applies to you, simply use your university email address when creating a new account in order to enjoy privileged access (more information here).
But providing privileged access to these corpora is just the first step. This site’s main function is to aid in research using corpora and to facilitate communication between like-minded individuals with an interest in corpus linguistics.
Here you can:
- get information on the size, focus and specification of each corpus, as well as on how to cite them correctly
- look up corpus jargon expressions in the wiki
- discuss more complex search queries or problems in the forum (or, if you’re an experienced user, share your best practice examples with the community)
- read advice on how to get started with corpus linguistics and how to statistically analyse and present your results for your next term paper or thesis
- learn how to make your own corpus using concordancers, taggers, and parsers
