- Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech
The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) is an ongoing project to build a corpus of modern-day (post-
1940 ) written and spoken texts inScottish English and varieties of Scots. SCOTS has been available online since November2004 , and can be freely searched and browsed. By the end of the project, in mid-2007 , SCOTS aims to increase the size of the text collection to 4 million words.The project is a venture by the Department of English Language and STELLA project at the
University of Glasgow . SCOTS is grant-funded by theArts and Humanities Research Council .Language Variety
SCOTS contains texts in
Scottish English and varieties of broad Scots, including Doric,Lallans , urban varieties such asGlaswegian andInsular Scots . SCOTS contains ageographical spread of texts as well as ademographic spread. Each text is accompanied by extensivemetadata , including such information as author’s decade of birth, gender, occupation, birthplace and place of residence, and details about the text such as publication information, audience, date and genre.Genre and Mode
SCOTS is a
multimedia corpus, containing written texts and spoken texts, available as orthographic transcriptions, accompanied by source audio or video files. SCOTS includes a large number ofgenre s and text types, including prose fiction, poetry, business and personal correspondence, religious texts, parliamentary and administrative documents, emails, conversations and interviews.earch and Analysis
SCOTS can be investigated in various ways, depending on the user’s interest. The corpus can be browsed, for example by the author’s name or date of the text, and all texts can be downloaded in
plain text format.Transcriptions are synchronised with audio / video files, which are streamed and may also be downloaded.
An Advanced Search facility allows the user to build up more complex queries, choosing from all the fields available in the
metadata . Geographical results are plotted on an interactive map, so regional variation may be investigated.Advanced Search results can also be viewed as a KWIC concordance, which can be reordered to highlight
collocation al patterns.External links
* [http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/ Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech]
* [http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/about/publications/ List of academic publications by Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech]
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