Coming up in BYU-COCA, mini-interview with Prof. Mark Davies

I had the great pleasure to be able to put 4 questions to Professor Mark Davies about the BYU corpora tools and the upcoming changes (http://corpus.byu.edu/upcoming.asp).

1. Would you share what you think are interesting site user statistics?

There’s some good data at http://corpus.byu.edu/users.asp; let me know if you have questions about any of that.

2. What is the motivation behind the upcoming user interface changes?

The main thing is to have an interface that works well on laptops/desktops, as well as tablets, as well as mobile devices (cell phones, etc). More and more people are connecting to websites that work well as they are on-the-go with mobile devices, and the current corpus interface doesn’t work well for that.

3. Any chance of screenshot previews of the upcoming user interface?

Please see attached. As you can see, each of the four main “pages” — search, results, KWIC, and help — are in their own “page”, which takes up the whole screen. Users click on the tabs at the top of the page to move between these (just as they would click on the different “frames” in the existing interface). But because each “page” takes up the entire page, it will still work fine with cell phones, for example (where frames don’t work well at all).

The other cool thing in the new interface is the ability to create and use “virtual corpora” (see http://corpus.byu.edu/wikipedia.asp#tutorials for their implementation in Wikipedia corpus, using the current interface).

4. One tweeter (@cainesap) was wondering in what register would cat pictures go in the web genre corpus?

🙂 🙂 Good question. See the core.png file attached 🙂

The first screenshot indicates the new interface looks much cleaner and easier to use from mobiles devices and as a bonus my ebook – Quick Cups of COCA won’t be needing too much change for the new edition : )

Thanks to Professor Davies for taking time to answer this mini-interview and to you for reading.

Bonus Questions!

5. Do the search results screens stay the same as now?

Pretty similar; yes.

6. Still a mystery where cat pics and graphical memes, animated gifs go? : )​

This and many other equally profound questions can be answered with the new corpus :-).