Machine-readable form

Nowadays the term "corpus" nearly always implies the additional feature "machine-readable". This was not always the case as in the past the word "corpus" was only used in reference to printed text.

Today few corpora are available in book form - one which does exist in this way is "A Corpus of English Conversation" (Svartvik and Quirk 1980) which represents the "original" London-Lund corpus. Corpus data (not excluding context-free frequency lists) is occasionally available in other forms of media. For example, a complete key-word-in-context concordance of the LOB corpus is available on microfiche, and with spoken corpora copies of the actual recordings are sometimes available - this is the case with the Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus but not with the London-Lund corpus.

Machine-readable corpora possess the following advantages over written or spoken formats:

They can be searched and manipulated at speed. (This is something which we covered at the end of Part One).
They can easily be enriched with extra information. (We will examine this in detail later.)

If you haven't already done so you can now read about other characteristics of the modern corpus.

Sampling and representativeness | Finite size | Standard reference