ICAME

The International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) is an international group of linguists and data scientists working in corpus linguistics to digitise English texts. The organisation was founded in Oslo, Norway in 1977 as the International Computer Archive of Modern English, before being renamed to its current title.

The portal to their materials is hosted at the University of Bergen, where they have set out the aim of the organization to "collect and distribute information on English language material available for computer processing and on linguistic research to compile an archive of English text corpora in machine-readable form, and to make material available to research institutions." Creating computer corpora, i.e. collections of texts in machine-readable form, is the most accessible way to study both transcribed spoken language and various genres of written texts for modern scholars, including both "descriptive and more theoretically-minded linguists".

The ICAME group hosts academic conferences that focus on corpus linguistic studies of historical changes and contemporary grammatical descriptions of English, and makes corpora of different varieties of English available to scholars, starting with editions of the 1960s Brown Corpus. Their first academic conference was held in Bergen, Norway in 1979, and scholars who were interested in corpus linguistics continued to meet each spring in different European and English-speaking countries. At these meetings, the compilation and distribution of corpora they enabled played a key role in the creation of the field of corpus linguistics in the 20th century, a precursor to current big data analytics. In summarizing the field, Kennedy's Introduction to Corpus Linguistics notes that "for corpus linguists with an interest in the description of English, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English has been the major resource". The influence of ICAME on the field has also be laid out in Facchinetti's history, Corpus Linguistics Twenty-five Years On.

One influential resource that ICAME made available was a CD of 20 different corpora, including those covering different regional Englishes (such as the Australian Corpus of English, the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English, the Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English, the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, and the International Corpus of English—East-African component), as well as versions of the Brown Corpus and the Lancaster-Bergen-Oslo (LOB) corpus tagged for part of speech.

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