What Kind of Data is it? Situating Sociolinguistic Corpora in Context

In my presentation I will discuss how sociolinguistic corpora can be compiled so as to document and maximize access to the context of its collection. This is no doubt a murky issue for the coding and categorization enterprise, but it is as critical as demographic information if we are going to be able to compare data sets from different communities, eras or across research projects. However, how far does the researcher go in documenting this type of information? My goal in this presentation will be to outline what I have found to be ‘best practice’ in my own research while at the same time highlighting issues and problems I have encountered along the way. I build on the foundations of earlier corpus-building projects (1991; Sankoff & Sankoff, 1973; Sankoff & Cedergren, 1971; Thibault & Vincent, 1990, Poplack, 1989 #1063) and on data arising from my own fieldwork conducted in the UK and Canada between 1995-2011 (Tagliamonte, 1996-1998, 1999-2001, 2001-2003, 2003-2006, 2007-2010, 2010-2013).