Who was that masked man? He left a silver jacket...

Okay, I finally have the ANC/Buffistas Influence English proposal written up. Will you erudite and logical people read it over and then I guess it goes to Lightbulbs?

THANK YOU!

BTW, the ANC folks are THRILLED by all this. It's as if they were entomologists and I had said, "Oh, I have all these uncatalogued bugs in my uncle's basement. Tons of 'em. Let me see if he'll let you look at 'em." Also, I found out that half of the board of the ANC are Buffy fans!

Proposal:

I propose that the board agree to individual members allowing their posts to be added to the American National Corpus, in order to further language scholarship and research (and not incidentally make it easier to get ‘foamy’ in the dictionary).

Information on the ANC is here; [link]

How will it work?

First of all, only currently closed threads will be eligible for the ANC. Which ones, yet, are not determined, but most likely Natter, Music, and the Show/Spoiler Threads. Bitches will not be one of the threads (too much personal info). Unamericans/Canadians will not be included, either (supposed to be for American English). FanFiction and San Sacre will not be included (too hard to separate fiction from nonfiction).

Secondly, individual posters have to opt in by sending me an email, the text of which is below (linky goodness should also happen here), giving permission. You do not have to use your real name to give permission, only your user name.

Thirdly, I (erinaceous) will be doing the stripping out of non-opt-in-ers, so no UnBuffista eyes will see the data until posts from people who don’t want their posts included in the ANC have been removed.

Fourthly, the posts, once in the hands of the ANC, will be further anonymized: all screen names and personal names will be replaced by tags that say "SCREEN NAME" and "PERSONAL NAME", essentially.

The posts will be part of a 200 million word corpus of American English, used mainly by language researchers and lexicographers to figure out how people actually write and speak. It’s difficult to get online material that is both reasonably good English (although of course I think the Buffistas are more than reasonably good writers of English!) and organized enough to be of value. Contributing your posts will help to advance language research in the U.S. a great deal.

TEXT OF PERMISSION EMAIL: By submitting this e-mail, I, _______________ (user name), hereby grant to the American National Corpus Consortium (ANCC), a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reformat, reproduce, and distribute through the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania, in electronic form or any and all media hereinafter developed, my anonymized posts to the Phoenix Board/Buffistas.org as part of a collection of American English-language material. I agree to the terms of use (outlined here: [link] and understand that the collection will be made available to others for the purposes of linguistic education, research, and development.

Second!!

Second Third.

Fourth

Fifth.

Number!

That's some creepy post-number/post-content symmetry.

Oh, and, uh, seventh, I guess.

How many seconds do we need?

Because I second (eighth, whatever) it.

I believe we just need four seconds. To Lightbulbs, ahoy!