Our overall aim is to facilitate exploration of the diversity in children's writing, by using the growing potential of hypermedia technology.

The specific objectives in building the LCPW Corpus are:

1. to produce an electronic version of the text of the children's projects, so that they can be explored using text analysis software, such as concordance programs.

2. as a prerequisite for A., to develop a consistent and transparent scheme for transcribing children's texts, since most of them are hand-written;

3. to enable study of grammatical features of the texts, by labelling each word with a grammatical wordclass tag;

4. to show a good approximation of the original visual appearance of each project, by means of a scanned image of each original page, and detailed notes stating what is not clear in the scan;

5. to enable easy navigation between textual and visual aspects of each project, and also across projects, both longitudinally for the same child, and laterally across the class.