Since 2012 the BBC have been working with the British Library to build a collection of intimate conversations from across the UK in the BBC Listening Project. Through its network of local radio stations, and with the help of a travelling recording booth the BBC has captured many conversations of people, who are well known to one another, on a range of topics in high quality audio.

For the past two years we have been discussing with the BBC and the British Library the possibility of using these recordings as the basis of a large scale extension of our spoken BNC corpus. The Spoken BNC2014 has been built so far to reflect language in intimate settings – with recordings made in the home. This has led to a large and very useful collection of data but, without the resources of an organization such as the BBC, we were not able to roam the country with a sound recording booth to sample language from John o’Groats to Land’s End! By teaming up with the BBC and British Library we can supplement this very useful corpus of data, which is strongly focused on a ‘hard to capture’ context, intimate conversations in the home, with another type of data, intimate conversations in a public situation sampled from across the UK.

Another way in which the Listening data should prove helpful to linguists is that the data itself was captured in a recording studio as high quality audio recordings. Our hope is that a corpus based on this material will be of direct interest and use to phoneticians.

We have recently concluded our discussion with the British Library, which is archiving this material, and signed an agreement which will see CASS undertake orthographic transcription of the data. Our goal is to provide a high quality transcription of the data which will be of use to linguists and members of the public, who may wish to browse the collection, alike. In doing this we will be building on our experience of producing the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of Spoken Learner English and the Spoken BNC2014.

We take our first delivery of recordings at the beginning of March and are very excited at the prospect of lifting the veil a little further on the fascinating topic of everyday conversation and language use. The plan is to transcribe up to 1000 of the recordings archived at the British Library. We will be working to time align the transcriptions with the sound recordings also and are working closely with our strong phonetics team in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University to begin to assess the extent to which this new dataset could facilitate new work, for example, on the accents of the British Isles.

Our partners in the British Library are just as excited as we are – Jonnie Robinson, lead Curator for Spoken English at the British Library says ‘The British Library is delighted to enable Lancaster to make such innovative use of the Listening Project conversations and we look forward to working with them to make the collection more accessible and to enhance its potential to support linguistic and other research enquiries’.

Keep an eye on the CASS website and Twitter feed over the next couple of years for further updates on this new project!