The Sketch Engine as infrastructure for historical corpora

A part of the case for corpus building is always that the corpus will have many users and uses. For that, it must be easy to use. A tool and web service that makes it easy is the Sketch Engine. It is commercial, but this can be advantageous: it means that the costs and maintenance of the service are taken care of. All parties stand to gain: the resource developers both have their resource showcased for no cost, and get to use the resource within the Sketch Engine themselves (often also at no cost). Other users benefit from the functions and features of the Sketch Engine. The tool already plays this role in relation to four historical corpora, three of which are briefly presented. A premise of historical corpus development is that a corpus, once created, will be widely used. If it is not easy to use it, this will not happen. In 2012, this means making it available to search over the web. You might do this by developing your own tool, or installing and using someone else’s, or getting someone else to handle that whole side of things for you.