The BT Correspondence Corpus 1853-1982 : the development and analysis of archival language resources
This thesis reports on the construction and analysis of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of business letters taken from the archives of British Telecom. The letters in the corpus cover the years 1853-1982. This is a crucial period in the development of business correspondence but is so far underrepresented in available historical corpora. This research contributes knowledge in two main areas. Firstly, a number of methodological issues are highlighted with regard to working with public archives to produce linguistic resources. The way in which archives are typically organised, particularly the lack of item-level metadata, presents a number of challenges in terms of locating relevant material and extracting the sort of metadata that is necessary for linguistic analysis. In this thesis I outline the approach that was taken in identifying and digitising the letters for the BTCC, the issues encountered, and the implications future projects that make use of public archives as a source of linguistic material. Secondly this study contributes new insights into the development of English business correspondence from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The results show a notable
Morton, Ralph
The BT Correspondence Corpus 1853-1982 : the development and analysis of archival language resources. This thesis reports on the construction and analysis of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of business letters taken from the archives of British Telecom. The letters in the corpus cover the years 1853-1982. This is a crucial period in the development of business correspondence but is so far underrepresented in available historical corpora. This research contributes knowledge in two main areas. Firstly, a number of methodological issues are highlighted with regard to working with public archives to produce linguistic resources. The way in which archives are typically organised, particularly the lack of item-level metadata, presents a number of challenges in terms of locating relevant material and extracting the sort of metadata that is necessary for linguistic analysis. In this thesis I outline the approach that was taken in identifying and digitising the letters for the BTCC, the issues encountered, and the implications future projects that make use of public archives as a source of linguistic material. Secondly this study contributes new insights into the development of English business correspondence from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The results show a notable
correspondence corpus development analysis archival language resource report construction analysis british correspondence corpus searchable database business letter take archive british letter corpus cover crucial_period development business correspondence far underrepresented available historical corpus contributes knowledge two_main area firstly number methodological_issue highlight regard work public archive produce linguistic_resource way archive typically organised particularly lack item level present number challenge term locate relevant material extract sort necessary linguistic_analysis outline take identify digitise letter issue encounter implication future project make_use public archive source linguistic material secondly study_contributes new_insight development english business correspondence show notable