Hoffmann, Sebastian, Univ.-Prof. Dr. < hoffmann@uni-trier.de>
The audio data for a sizeable proportion of the spoken component of the BNC has recently been made available - seehttp://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/AudioBNC. Access to many of these recordings (amounting to about 5.5 million words) is now possible straight from a query result in BNCweb on the Lancaster corpus server (http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk).
At the moment, the implementation of this new feature is still experimental and has not been thoroughly tested. If you notice anything that doesn't work, please send a bug report tobncweb@mac.com. Unfortunately, some of the alignment information provided in the original Praat TextGrid files seems to be off by quite a margin, so users may not hear what they expect to hear in some of the recordings. This situation might improve over the next months as I have implemented a crowd-sourcing facility for users to give feedback about whether the alignment was correct or not. Please make use of it as much as possible - thank you!
Unfortunately, not all browsers are fully compatible with the audio features of BNCweb. It seems that particularly Chrome is experiencing difficulties. I recommend the use of Safari or Firefox instead.
New users of BNCweb can set up their own login and password by registering athttp://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/. By default, access to certain features (e.g. context display of query results, total number of query hits) is limited for licensing reasons. If you own a license for the XML version of the BNC, please contactbncweb@mac.comwith some proof of purchase and ask for your username to be changed to "full access". For institutional licenses, full access will be possible for anybody signing up with a relevant email address.
At the moment, the layout of the audio navigation tools is not yet ideal - feedback and suggestions for changes are welcome!
Best regards,
Sebastian Hoffmann
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Prof. Dr. Sebastian Hoffmann
FB II Anglistik
Universität Trier
D-54286 Trier
