Re: Corpora: Technical Documents for Corpus Studies?

Dominic Dunlop (domo@vo.lu)
Wed, 9 Sep 1998 21:24:28 +0000

At 13:57 +0000 09-09-1998, Uta Schwertel wrote:
> For linguistic research on plural phenomena I am looking for electronically
> available *technical* documents from different areas. These technical
> documents could be (software) specifications, instructions, maintenance
> manuals, system descriptions etc. The documents should be written in full
> or controlled natural language (preferably English).
>
> I need a reasonably large and diverse set of texts but found it difficult
> to get freely available sources.

GNU software distributions, freely available, for example, at
<ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/software/mirror/gnu/>, usually incorporate
lots of English-language documentation in several of the categories you
mention. You'll have to download and unpack the whole distribution of a
particular package and then poke around its source code tree to find its
documentation; the file =README-about-.gz-files gives terse instructions on
the unpacking stage. See <http://www.fsf.org/doc/doc.html> for more
information.

If you step up a level, to
<ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/software/mirror/>, you're looking at lots
more stuff. For example, the cert directory leads to bulletins from the
computer emergency response team. And so on.

--
Dominic Dunlop