Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American

English (COCA)Carl Burnett1 April 2012

a UW iSchool info skills workshop

A large (425 million-word) collection of electronic texts, with some very fancy search options

Compiled by Mark Davies, a computational linguist @Brigham Young University

What is it?

Answering language-based questions in an objective way: using data.◦ Who is more likely to use the word contemptible, fiction writers or journalists?

◦ What are some synonyms of the word research?◦ What nouns are most likely to be described as glittering?

What’s it good for?

More search features:◦ Wildcards◦ Proximity searching (collocates)◦ Parts of speech

Categorized source material:◦ Academic writing◦ Fiction◦ Spoken text◦ Newspaper◦ Magazine

Search by time period (1990-2011)

Why not just use Google?

Free access (create an account for full features) at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

Let’s play around with it!