The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) hosts AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics, the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) centre which supports academics working with digital resources in all areas of literary and linguistic studies.

Across the Sciences and the Humanities, the emerging e-Science agenda is set to transform how researchers do their work, how they collaborate, how they share data, how they report their findings, and what infrastructure they require.

A one-day symposium was held on Thursday 20th September 2007 at the Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road, Oxford, bringing researchers in linguistics and applied linguistics together with leading proponents of e-Science research in the UK to discuss the potential for new forms of advanced ICT research in linguistics and related areas.

The event was organised by Svenja Adolphs (University of Nottingham) and Martin Wynne (Oxford), with the support of the 'Digital Record' node of the National Centre for e-Social Science, the Oxford e-Research Centre, the Oxford Text Archive, the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, and the Arts and Humanities Data Service.

For access to the presentations, see the New Horizons in Linguistics symposium webpage hosted by the Oxford e-Research Centre.

AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics is one of the leading organisations behind the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) inititiative. Martin Wynne, head of AHDS Literarture, Languages and Linguistics, is one of the four co-ordinators organising the project, and the AHDS is coordinating the UK activities of this network. This initiative has been inspired by the success of the AHDS in the UK, and can be seen, in part, as an attempt to extend the AHDS framework to the European level.

CLARIN is committed to establish a pan-European integrated and interoperable research infrastructure of language resources and related technologies. It aims to lift the current fragmentation, and offer a stable, persistent, accessible and extendable infrastructure which can facilitate the emergence of eScience research in literary and linguistic subject areas. The proposed infrastructure will be:

• integrated: the resource and service centres connected via Grid technology and form a virtually integrated domain
• interoperable: the resources and services based on Semantic Web technologies to overcome format, structure and terminological differences
• persistent: sutainable resources and services accessible for many years so that researchers can rely on them
• accessible: the resources and services accessible via the web; different access methods and training possibilities are offered tailored to the needs of the communities making use of them
• extendable: the infrastructure is open so that new resources and services can be added easily
• CLARIN is devoted to create an infrastructure that will boost humanities research in multicultural and multilingual Europe, and facilitate multilingual and multicultural education in schools, colleges and universities.

For more information, please visit the CLARIN webpages, or contact Martin Wynne, one of the CLARIN co-ordinators.

Developing Linguistic Corpora: a guide to good practice is one of the main outputs of the recent focus on linguistics. It is the latest in the series of AHDS Guides. It aims to help researchers who are planning a project to create a corpus.

The Guide can be viewed for free online at http://ahds.ac.uk/linguistic-corpora/, and can be ordered online from Oxbow Books at http://www.oxbowbooks.com/ For review copies, bulk orders, and any questions, please contact martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk.

The AHDS is building its collections, particularly with resources which have been created by, or are of use to, researchers in linguistics. If you have any such resources which you think may be suitable for deposit, please get in touch. Here's why you should deposit with us:

• preservation: we have procedures in place for the long-term preservation of resources;
• publicity: archiving your resource will ensure it's entry in our catalogue and ensure that more people find out about it; we are also allowing our catalogue to be shared with portals and search engines for people looking for academic resources;
• distribution: we'll do the work of distributing the resource for you, if this is what you want.

There are hundreds of items in the AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics collections, in around 20 different languages. Many of these are electronic versions of literary texts. All are free, and there is no need to register. Please feel free to browse or search the catalogue here on the AHDS collections pages. We will very shortly be upgrading the search facility!

See a listing of the corpora in the archive.

All are free, and there is no registration required. However, users are required to agree to the conditions of distribution of the resources, and some resource providers ask that you contact them first to obtain permission. At the moment most resources can be downloaded instantly, and we are trying to streamline the service and make things easier for the rest.

The AHDS offers advice and carries out technical assessments on research grant proposals to the AHRC which are linguistics-related and involve the creation of an electronic resource. Please go to our AHRC funding page to find out more, and perhaps increase your chances of getting a grant!

We have compiled a list of links to organisations and departments in the UK which teach or research linguistics. Linguistics in the UK links

And we know that you don't just want another page of linguistics links, so for a gateway to more general linguistics links, we recommend Intute: Arts and Humanities.