Online statistics labs

Recent publications in the field of corpus linguistics (including several in this and the previous issue of CLLT) strongly indicate that the field is on its way from a view of corpora as mere repositories of authentic data from which examples can be culled ad libitum to a methodology that analyzes linguistic phenomena systematically and exhaustively as they manifest themselves in corpus data. Thereby, corpus linguistics is becoming an attractive complement to other empirical research methods in the language sciences, such as experimental designs. One essential feature of any full-blown methodological approach is that its results are subjected to the scrutiny of statistical testing. However, while access to expensive statistics software packages is routinely available at most departments in the natural and social sciences, many linguistics departments are not as well equipped. In this review, I will briefly present and evaluate five freely accessible online statistics labs that will satisfy many of the statistical demands of a quantitativelyminded corpus linguist. I use the term “online statistics labs” to refer to websites which offer interactive applets for the online calculation of different statistical procedures. That is, I specifically selected websites