The VESPA macros and Perl scripts are largely based on the macros developed by Alois Heuboeck for the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (cf. Ebeling &Heuboeck 2007; Heuboeck et al. 2008), and were adjusted for VESPA also by Alois Heuboeck (Reading University, UK).
We are indebted to the research project ‘An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing in British Higher Education' for developing the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus from which we borrowed the original Word macros and Perl scripts used to encode and format VESPA texts. The BAWE corpus was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes, under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), with funding from the ESRC.
We are very grateful to:
- Alois Heuboeck (Reading University, UK) who wrote the VESPA Word macros and Perl scripts.
- Signe Oksefjell Ebeling (University of Oslo, Norway) who shared her experience of encoding and annotating corpora with us.
- Larry Valentin (MA student at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) who tested the VESPA Word macros and wrote a first draft of the VESPA tagging manual.
- Heidi Fossan (MA student at the University of Oslo, Norway) who tested and commented on an earlier version of the VESPA macros.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo, Norway, for funding the development of the VESPA Word macros and Perl scripts.
References
- Ebeling, S.O. & Heuboeck, A. (2007). Encoding document information in a corpus of student writing: the British Academic Written English Corpus. Corpora 2(2): 241-256.
- Heuboeck, A., Holmes, J. & Nesi, H. (2008). The BAWE Corpus Manual. http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/app_ling/internal/bawe/BAWE.documentation.pdf