Building LANA-CASE, a spoken corpus of American English conversation : Challenges and innovations in corpus compilation

Hanks, Elizabeth and McEnery, Anthony and Egbert, Jesse and Larsson, Tove and Biber, Douglas and Reppen, Randi and Baker, Paul and Brezina, Vaclav and Brookes, Gavin and Clarke, Isobelle and Bottini, Raffaella (2024) Building LANA-CASE, a spoken corpus of American English conversation : Challenges and innovations in corpus compilation. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 12 (2). pp. 24-44.

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Abstract

The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of Spoken American English (LANA-CASE) is a collaborative project between Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University to create a publicly available, large-scale corpus of American English conversation. In this article, we describe the design of LANA-CASE in terms of the challenges that have arisen and how these have been addressed – including decisions related to operationalizing the domain, sampling the data, recruiting participants, and selecting instruments for data collection. In addressing these challenges, we were able to draw on and further develop strategies established in the creation of other spoken corpora (including the British English counterpart to LANA-CASE, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014) as well as to implement recent theoretical and technical innovations related to each step. We hope that this discussion can inform future projects focused on the design and construction of spoken corpora.