About VOICE CLARIAH

The main aim of the VOICE CLARIAH project is to update and enhance the web interface of VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English) in order to ensure its long-term availability as an open-access resource for the description of spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) to researchers worldwide. The project updates and improves the system architecture behind VOICE Online, relying on VOICE XML and VOICE POS XML, to support the existing online applications of the corpus with new tools. A second goal is to integrate VOICE into the CLARIAH-AT infrastructure to guarantee continued and stable access for corpus users.

To carry out these tasks, we are updating and merging the existing TEI-conform XML structures of VOICE XML and VOICE POS XML and devising an advanced backend for the corpus, relying partly on NoSketch Engine but also on XML, html and json technologies. A substantial part of the project is dedicated to the design and implementation of a new frontend for the web application of VOICE Online. This process of updating the backend and frontend of VOICE Online involves technological improvements, such as responsive design, customizability of features or increased processing speed. In addition, the new VOICE Online interface will also provide corpus users and applied linguists with new and advanced filter options and additional search and style features based on mark-up and annotation included in VOICE transcripts.

The new VOICE Online interface is developed in the VOICE CLARIAH project by an interdisciplinary team of applied linguists, corpus linguists, computational linguists, software developers, programmers, web designers and digital humanities experts. The project team draws on and expands synergies between digital technologies and corpus linguistics, especially working towards improved technologies for spoken corpora, analysis of interaction and multilingual data. Researchers from the Austrian Centre of Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna closely collaborate in the VOICE CLARIAH project to the secure improved usability and long-term availability of VOICE Online.

The new VOICE 3.0 Online interface will be released as an open-access tool for corpus linguists, ELF scholars and applied linguists worldwide (planned release: September 2021). In spring 2021, a pre-final beta version of the new VOICE Online interface was made available to interested users for a two-week period of beta-testing (23 April – 7 May 2021).

If you would like to receive updates about VOICE CLARIAH or if you are interested in participating in our beta-testing phase in spring 2021, please sign up for our VOICE CLARIAH newsletter.