> I am doing a research on the history of electronic corpora for my Ph D
> Thesis and I would like to know when the following electronic corpora
> were compiled:
> "Corpus Leuven-Drama"
I'm not sure of the extact date of this, but it was deposited with the
Oxford Text Archive shortly after its completion, in October 1980.
> "Corpus Longman-Lancaster";
?? sorry, no idea.
>"Corpus Cobuild/The Birmingham Collection of English Text/Bank of
English";
According to their web page, COBUILD had been collecting texts since 1980,
and the Bank of English was launched in 1991
See http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/
>"The Oxford Text Archive";
The OTA was established by Lou Burnard at OUCS in 1976, and still going
strong! See http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
>"International Computer Archive of Modern English".
I don't have a definite date for this, but they the ICAME journal goes
back to 1985, so I would guess that it originated some time in the early
1980's
Much of this information came from the ICAME web page,
ftp://nora.hd.uib.no/pub/icame/
I hope this is useful as a starting point for your research, if you
require more details on the OTA in particular please get back in touch
with me,
Yours,
Alan Morrison
Information Officer
Oxford Text Archive