“Kia ora. This is my earthquake story”. Multiple applications of a sociolinguistic corpus

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how spoken data, collected using sociolinguistic methods, can have multiple applications outside of its original intended use within sociolinguistics. It can be a resource for tackling real-world problems, it can be a platform for community engagement and it can function as a source of data for academic research (both linguistic and non-linguistic research). The spoken data we describe is a new corpus of monologues called the UC QuakeBox corpus. First, we introduce and demonstrate the QuakeBox corpus, and outline some of the rewards and challenges associated with collecting stories in a manner that was purposefully and saliently in the public eye. Next, we focus on applications of the QuakeBox corpus by exploring case studies which are utilising data from the corpus for non-linguistic work. We situate this work within the wider field of applied sociolinguistics.