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Mark Davies created
these corpora at Brigham Young University
(BYU), beginning in 2004. During this time, they
were available online at corpus.byu.edu, and they were known as the "BYU Corpora".
Starting in 2016, Scott Miller,
the new dean of the College of Humanities (assisted by
Jared Christensen, college controller) took several actions that seriously
threatened the future of the corpora. Despite numerous requests,
the
central
administration did
nothing to help. This was in spite of the fact that people from outside of BYU
used the corpora more than any other resource at BYU,
and that the corpora have been
cited more in academic publications than any other resource created at BYU.
(To be fair, though, part of the explanation for the actions of these
administrators is that the
primary mission of BYU is only tangentially related to academics. As a
result, some people at BYU don't really understand how to support academically-oriented projects that have real importance and significance.)
At any rate, once it became clear that the corpora were under threat at BYU, Mark
Davies asked for and received formal approval to move the corpora off-campus to
www.english-corpora.org, which he did in 2019.
The end result of these changes is that there is no longer any connection
between the corpora and BYU. This will help to protect the corpora, and to ensure their long-term availability for
researchers, teachers, and students.
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