What is VOICE 3.0?

The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) is a collection of language data, the first computer corpus capturing spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. Ever since its first launch in 2009, VOICE has been a valuable open-access resource for research on ELF communication.

More than a decade after its release, an update of the system architecture behind VOICE was required to make the VOICE online applications (VOICE Online and VOICE POS Online) fit for stable, long-term use in research and teaching.

As a first intermediate step, the VOICE Online 2.0 interface was moved to a new server provided by the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in September 2020. For users of VOICE, this has meant continued, more stable and reliable access to VOICE 2.0 Online and VOICE POS Online from September 2020 to September 2021. (Until the end of 2021, VOICE 2.0 Online will remain accessible here.)

From spring 2020 to September 2021, the VOICE CLARIAH team have developed a new backend and frontend for VOICE Online in the VOICE CLARIAH project. The new user interface VOICE 3.0 Online was released on 23 September 2021 and includes improved search facilities, expanded filter and style options, improved bookmarks and new download functions. The search facilities in VOICE 3.0 Online rely on No Sketch Engine (NoSkE) technologies (Rychlý 2007; Kilgarriff et al. 2014). An additional software was specifically designed by the VOICE CLARIAH team to mediate between NoSke and VOICE 3.0 Online. This software is available here.

References/NoSkE credits

Kilgarriff, Adam; et al. 2014. “The Sketch Engine: ten years on”. Lexicography 1(1), 7-36.

Rychlý, Pavel. 2007. “Manatee/Bonito: a modular corpus manager”. RASLAN, 65-70.