TIME Magazine Corpus of American English
- Purpose
- Nature
- Extent
- Effect
I tried keeping these four things in mind while evaluating the TIME Magazine Corpus website.
1. The purpose of the website is to catalogue the words used within TIME Magazine between 1923 until the present, show how often words were used, how the meaning of certain words have changed over time, and how the English language has changed over time.
2. The nature of the website is very basic. You type in a word or phrase you would like to search the database for, you can restrict the results to certain years or leave it open for all possible results, and then the results are displayed to you on the right hand side based on decades and total numbers of use of whatever you searched. There are no opinions on TIME magazine included, no analysis or synopsis of articles, you are simply shown a sentence or two within which the word/phrase you searched is contained.
3. The extent to which they use TIME Magazine’s articles is … well … not very broad. The website does not include full articles, as stated in their FAQ section:
9. Can I get access to the full text of these corpora?
Unfortunately, no, for reasons of copyright discussed above. We would love to allow end users to have access to full-text, but we simply cannot. Even when “no one else will ever use it” and even when “it’s only one article or one page” of text, we can’t. We have to be 100% compliant with US Fair Use Law, and that means no full text for anyone under any circumstances — ever. Sorry about that.
And in number 8: “They (Google) retrieve and index billions of words of copyright material, but they only allow end users to access “snippets” of this data from their servers. Click here for an extended discussion of US Fair Use Law and how it applies to our COCA texts.”
4. The effect that this website has on TIME is close to zero. The site makes no profit off of TIME articles, they do not include full articles, they do not claim to have written the articles themselves (so they are avoiding plagiarism and all that wonderful stuff), and they do not even include photos from the magazine.
TIME would really waste their own time pursuing a lawsuit against this site, as the purpose of it is simply to show a type of study on many different types of linguistics in the US publication of TIME (morphology, semantics, and discourse analysis included). So in effect the site is using TIME as an example since it is such a popular publication. People know it, they are used to it, it has published (insert number of issues here because I cannot find the actual number!) since it began, and it is an obvious choice to make when trying to create a study on language.
There is nothing interesting about why they chose the year 1923 to start cataloging TIME in this corpus. TIME was created in 1923, so that is obviously the reason the year was chosen.
It was kind of fun to go through the database to see the patterns of certain words and how much they were used in different decades. Some words gradually disappear while others become more common. Some words gradually become more common and then begin to drop off again in recent time. It is a basic website that just focuses on TIME magazine articles, and it does basically what other word count website does except that it does focus on a certain publication and not just publications (whether that publication was in a magazine, on Facebook, searched for on google, etc.) in general.