ARCHER: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers
ARCHER is a multi-genre corpus of British and American English covering the period 1650-1999, first constructed by Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan in the 1990s. It is now in in-house use and managed as an ongoing project by a consortium of participants at fourteen universities in seven countries.
Versions of ARCHER
A number of slightly different versions have been widely used for research on the history of English, up to ARCHER 2 of 2004-5. The current version is known as ARCHER 3.1 and was completed in summer 2006. For a list of recent publications that have made use of ARCHER at one of the participating departments, click here.
Over the period 2008-11 there will be a new phase of correction, expansion and tagging, known as ARCHER 3.2. There will probably be intermediate updates before the programme is completed. ARCHER 3.2 is being coordinated from Manchester.