Digital Humanities Abstracts

“Introducing SARA”
Lou Burnard Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University Computing Services

SARA (SGML Aware Retrieval Application) is a client/server text retrieval system which can be used to search, browse, and display very large SGML documents. It was developed at OUCS with funding from the British Library as a part of the British National Corpus (BNC) project. This DTI/SERC project resulted in the creation of a 100 million word corpus of modern British English, both spoken and written, in which each word is linguistically tagged and the whole structure is marked up in TEI-conformant SGML. The presentation will explain the basic approach taken in designing SARA, and demonstrate the facilities of the current version as a means of providing general access to the BNC, or other very large SGML documents, for a range of uses, both novice and specialist. For more detail, see
http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/sara.html