LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Linguistics and the Arts and Humanities Data Service

Martin Wynne - 20 December 2002

The explosion of access to electronic texts and information about languages and cultures on the Internet offers wonderful new resources for linguists. However, the texts available often present themselves to the researcher as a bewildering choice of unfiltered data. The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is centrally funded as the centre of expertise in the creation and use of electronic texts for languages, literature and linguistics in the UK academic community, as part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). This paper describes the ways in which the OTA (http://www.ota.ahds.ac.uk ) is currently working in particular to improve the service which it provides specifically for people working in the subject field of linguistics in the UK Higher and Further Education communities. The AHDS is a UK national service funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). Organised via an Executive at King's College London, and five service providers from various Higher Education institutions, the AHDS aids the discovery, creation and preservation of digital collections in the arts and humanities.