Background and history

(From the corpus website)

The Corpus of Contemporary American English was created by Mark Davies, Professor of Corpus Linguistics at Brigham Young University. Some scanning of original texts (mainly novels) was done by students at BYU. Mark Davies was responsible for all other aspects of the corpus construction – collecting and editing the electronic texts, designing and implementing the corpus architecture, and designing and programming the web interface.

Thanks go to the Department of Linguistics and English Language and the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University for giving me a sabbatical in Fall 2008 (during which the final stages of the corpus were completed), as well as for the funds to purchase a new server in Fall 2008. Thanks also to Microsoft for providing a free version of SQL Server 2005 (64-bit Enterprise version), which serves as the backbone of the corpus architecture. Finally, thanks to Paul Rayson and other in the CLAWS development team for the version of CLAWS that was used to tag the corpus.