Making a corpus accessible for third parties to use

[Helena Stoop-Koornhof]

I am a lecturer teaching law and specifically writing skills. I am working on a pilot project using corpora to help teach legal writing skills. What I hope to do is to build a corpus and to then somehow have that be accessible to my students to use. Is this at all possible? 

In other words, I am keen for the student to be able to follow a link (or similar) that takes them to the corpus that is already built. They can then insert words and phrases and see the results. I have to use a bespoke corpus for this (nothing available online will do). 

Is this at all possible? From what I could find out regarding AntConc I would have to give them the texts and they would have to download the software, import the documents and build the corpus themselves before engaging with it. 

Can it be saved/exported (while active)? 

Thank you and best wishes!

H

[Laurence Anthony]

Hi Helena,

Sorry for the slow response. I've found that some discussion items were being sent to my Spam folder. I've now fixed the problem.

To answer your question, yes you can create a single-file corpus in AntConc 4 and then distribute it to students. Follow the steps below:

1) Create your corpus (in any way you like)

2) Select the corpus

3) In the Active Corpus view, click "Save" and save the corpus to a location on your computer. You can distribute this to your students.

4) Students can load the corpus by opening the corpus manager, selecting the "Pre-built" corpus option and clicking "Open" next to name of the active corpus.

I hope that helps!

Laurence.

[Elnaz Kia]

Dear Laurence,

I have the same inquiry as Helena. However, I do have a question/concern about copyright issues. 

I am giving a workshop to Dual Language Immersion (DLI) teachers on creating corpus-based materials. The corpus that I would like to share with the teachers at the workshop has access constraints. That is, I can not share the corpus files with the teachers. My question is whether I can follow the steps you mentioned above without compromising the access agreement. Would the users be able to download the files if I share the corpus with them? How can I share the active corpus with specific users? 

I would appreciate your help!

Many thanks,

Elnaz Kia