Handling the British National Corpus
This is a list of the codes inserted by Dave Lee for the BNC. His aim was to go through the texts classifying their genres. (The original BNC file names and folders are completely uninformative.)
The point of it...
The advantage is that it is now possible to reorder the texts into meaningful folders.
The Genre codes
S = spoken
W = written
The actual tags in the header look like this (box shows the mark-up Dave Lee provided) :
<S brdcast discussn>
<S brdcast documentary>
<S brdcast news>
<S classroom>
<S consult>
<S conv>
<S courtroom>
<S demonstratn>
<S interview>
<S interview oral history>
<S lect commerce>
<S lect humanities arts>
<S lect nat science>
<S lect polit law edu>
<S lect soc science>
<S meeting>
<S parliament>
<S pub debate>
<S sermon>
<S speech scripted>
<S speech unscripted>
<S sportslive>
<S tutorial>
<S unclassified>
<W ac humanities arts>
<W ac medicine>
<W ac nat science>
<W ac polit law edu>
<W ac soc science>
<W ac tech engin>
<W admin>
<W advert>
<W biography>
<W commerce>
<W email>
<W essay school>
<W essay univ>
<W fict drama>
<W fict poetry>
<W fict prose>
<W hansard>
<W institut doc>
<W instructional>
<W letters personal>
<W letters prof>
<W misc>
<W news script>
<W newsp brdsht nat arts>
<W newsp brdsht nat commerce>
<W newsp brdsht nat editorial>
<W newsp brdsht nat misc>
<W newsp brdsht nat report>
<W newsp brdsht nat science>
<W newsp brdsht nat social>
<W newsp brdsht nat sports>
<W newsp other arts>
<W newsp other commerce>
<W newsp other report>
<W newsp other reportage>
<W newsp other science>
<W newsp other social>
<W newsp other sports>
<W newsp tabloid>
<W non ac humanities arts>
<W non ac medicine>
<W non ac nat science>
<W non ac polit law edu>
<W non ac soc science>
<W non ac tech engin>
<W pop lore>
<W religion>
These categories are much more useful than the original file-names and folders. Use them to be able to select sections of the BNC which interest you. You can use WordSmith's Text Converter to get the whole BNC re-sorted so that each text goes into a folder using these categories.
