What makes the Bolton/Worktown corpus unique?

 

The Bolton/Worktown corpus is unique in that it allows us to look back at informal spoken language around 80 years ago, an era well before the technology which underpins contemporary spoken corpora was available.  The quality of the Bolton/Worktown data cannot be the same as that found in contemporary spoken corpora, but it is good enough, I argue, to permit fascinating insights into spoken language at the time and to provide interesting comparisons with spoken language of today. 

 

Where does the Bolton/Worktown data come from?

 

To set the Bolton/Worktown corpus data in context, it is important to understand the source of the data and the way the corpus has been compiled.  The data is taken from the Worktown papers of the Mass Observation Archive.  Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings, and Tom Harrisson, and was essentially concerned with making a detailed sociological and anthropological study of the working classes of Britain (Jeffrey 1999). The Worktown project took place between 1937 and 1940 and was carried out by placing observers in the local community to report on the behaviour and attitudes of the working class in relation to a range of topics such as sport, leisure, work, religion and the war.

 

Who were the observers?

 

In terms of verisimilitude of the data, it is important to consider the credentials of the observers in relation to the task: Hinton (2013: 35) notes that there was a shifting cast of middle-class outsiders involved in M-O in Bolton.  Hinton(2013: 35), however, points out that ‘Harrisson’s key men, and his local helpers, had all been recruited as ‘native informants’, familiar with the culture they were studying’.  There was always, therefore, a local core to the observation team, and observers who were not ‘native informants’ were coached in the dialect by Harry Gordon, a local unemployed fitter (Hinton 2013).  The photo below shows a meeting of the observers at their 'headquarters' in a terraced house in Davenport St,

Bolton.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                         Photo©Bolton Council

How was the data gathered?

 

As a relatively small part of their work, these observers gathered spoken data in different ways:  on occasion they did this by eavesdropping and transcribing ‘live’ parts of conversations they overheard in public places such as pubs, shops, sports grounds or even beaches (at nearby Blackpool); on other occasions they stopped people on the street and wrote down responses to specific oral survey questions about, for example, the war situation or a particular political event.  Clearly it was a great challenge for the observers to transcribe conversations verbatim without recording equipment and often while trying to operate incognito.

Specific examples of surreptitious recording techniques employed by observers are provided by Hinton (2013): one observer working in a factory appeared to be constantly writing lettersto ‘Aunt Emma’ while actually transcribing conversations; another made frequent trips to the factory toilet to write notes on what she had just overheard. In the case of oral surveys, observers wrote down the replies as the interviewee was answering the next question (Ferraby 1944).

 

How was the Bolton/Worktown corpus compiled?

 

Compiling the Bolton Corpus has involved scanning through the voluminous archive to identify the spoken data which is scattered unsystematically and often unpredictably among 400,000 pages of records gathered for this sociological study. This process has yielded around 80,000 words.  Due to the way in which it was recorded (see above), the spoken data is, however, fragmentary:  conversations are often incomplete and sometimes we have little or no information about the speaker.

 

How much confidence can we have in the data?

 

For the purposes of collating the corpus I exercised quality control by including only data where I was confident the observer had made an effort to transcribe verbatim. This might be indicated, for example, by the presence of ellipsis, contractions, questions tags, or dialect words. Inevitably there is an element of intuition in such judgements, but as a native of Bolton I can at least claim informed intuition.

For more detailed information on the data, see Timmis (2010) and Timmis (2015) under Further Reading.