Corpus Methods in a Digitized World

Abstract

Data is available like never before. We believed that back in the 1990s, but corpora are even larger today than they were then, and corpora will continue to grow for some time to come. Thus far, corpus sizes have been limited by our ability to collect data, but we are rapidly approaching a fundamental limit on supply of written and spoken language. There are only so many people in the world, and they have only so much time to communicate with one another. It is becoming feasible to digitize a non-trivial fraction of the world’s communication. This ability is creating new opportunities for new audiences to join in on the fun. Google Ngrams makes it easy for anyone to apply corpus-based methods to half a trillion words (4% of all books ever printed). The popular press is referring to corpus methods and Google Ngrams as “addictive.” Computer Scientists are talking about “digital immortality” (recording much of human communication and storing it forever). Digital immortality may not be a reality just yet, but psychologists are currently recording most of what children say and hear between 2 months and 2 years of age in order to better understand language acquisition. As the world becomes digitized, there will be many applications of corpus-based methods that include lexicography (and so much more).