ARCHER: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers

ARCHER is a corpus of British and American English covering the period 1650-1990, originally compiled by Douglas Biber (NAU) and Edward Finegan (USC) in the early 1990s. It is managed as an ongoing project by a consortium of participants at fourteen universities in seven countries, as follows:

• Department of English, Northern Arizona University (NAU)
• Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California (USC)
• Department of English, University of Michigan
• Department of English, University of Helsinki
• Department of English, Uppsala University
• Department of English I, University of Freiburg (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
• Department of English, University of Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
• Department of English, University of Bamberg (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg)
• Department of English Studies, University of Trier
• Department of English, University of Zurich
• Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester
• Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University
• School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History, University of Salford
• Research Unit on Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization; Department of English and German, University of Santiago de Compostela

The current phase of the project, ARCHER 3.2, is intended to correct and expand the corpus over the period 2008-2010; the VLCG team is adding British legal texts.

David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza at the University of Manchester are coordinating the work being carried out in the international consortium and will report on progress and publications based on ARCHER on the following website:

http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/archer/

At present ARCHER is only available at one of the fourteen departments above mentioned. Interested scholars who wish to consult the corpus at Santiago de Compostela should contact María José López-Couso; the user agreement form can be found here.

You can also contact us regarding COLMOBAENG (A Corpus of Late Modern British and American English Prose). This is a separate database of British and American English texts compiled in 2006 by Teresa Fanego; it has about 1,170,000 words (800,000 BrE; 370,000 AmE) and comprises both fiction and nonfiction texts distributed by date in four different subperiods, as follows: 1700-1726 (BrE only; 200,000 words); 1732-1757 (200,000 words BrE; 50,000 words AmE); 1761-1797 (200,000 words BrE; 120,000 words AmE); 1850-1879 (BrE and AmE; 200,000 words each). For fuller details, click here.