Archive
How to use archive.org’s US-English news collection as a language learning corpus with QUIK-like speaking samples
- Much of TV news nowadays seems to amount to not much more than a constant stream of sound bites – however, exactly this brevity,
- the large archive and simple search interface:
- the research/browsing capabilities visible on the left here, including the varied sources – of which Arabic and French and other European TV likely provide a somewhat different perspectives on Edward Snowden –
- and the caption-like transcription, make it all the more accessible for intermediate learners of English.
- video clips of only 30 seconds length is hardly enough for instruction, however, you can have students work with corpus-QUIK-like spoken samples, and have them string a news history together if you design webquest-like research assignments – with the major added benefits, that this corpus is spoken and trains listening.
- For more background info on archive.org’s transcribed TV news, consult this NYTimes article.
Meta-search many historical German dictionaries and encyclopedias using Woerterbuchnetz.de
A meta-search by the University of Trier Center for Digital Humanities may not teach you much German – you need to know it already –, but help prevent you remaining a “one-dimensional man”.
I came to know a lot of those during my own German and history studies a long time ago – – when they still only existed on paper, if not parchment 
. Gotta love Digital Humanities, and find other activities for physical exercise. Her is an example search result:
Query treebanks with Fangorn for English SLA?
To provide inductive empirical examples, SLA classes have benefitted from query interfaces to target language text corpora in SLA. But corpora are usually POS-tagged – and queried – at best, which constitutes a certain “impedance mismatch” to what SLA classes actually teach. The Fangorn very large treebank query language beta demonstration page
looks already interesting for analyzing English in SLA (hover over tree elements to highlight the corresponding text), including, thanks to its capability of editing and refining queries graphically from the search results, for demonstrations during face-to-face classes. Wondering whether other corpora than Penn Treebank, Wikipedia (5k and 5000k sentences) will be made available online, and other languages but English will be supported.
A search interface to the EuroParl corpus
(Note the on my IE9, the text in the right column appears “blacked-out” – Select it to view, or use a different webbrowser).
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