Mark Daviesis the creator, sponsored by BYU and NEH, of several applications of different language’s corpuses. He has helped in the creation of Corpus del Español, the British National Corpus, the Corpus of American English or even the Corpus do Português. He has also created the OED Corpus of Historical English and the TIME Corpus. We can say that he is a man who has done a lot for the corpora on the net and who has created a lot of useful tools for linguists and people in general. But who is Mark Davies and what exactly do his proyects consist on?

First of all, we must say that Davies is a university teacher. He is proffesor of Corpus Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, United States of America. He had also been proffesor of Spanish Linguistics at Illinois State University. As we can find in his webpage at BYU, his primary research areas and activity are in things like corpus and computational linguistics, design and optimization of linguistic databases or historical linguistics and syntactic variation. That is, his works are always dedicated to language connecting with the Internet.

As I said previously, he has helped in the creation of several corpuses’ applications in different languages. This are useful tools which worked exactly as a normal corpus. They are less complete than the corpus of the National Institutions of each country. That is, the Corpus del Español of Davies/BYU/NEH is less complete than the two corpuses created by the Royal Spanish Academy: CREA and CORDE. But anyway, Davies’ corpora is also very useful for people in general. You can take a look to some comparissons between the British National Corpus and the application of the British National Corpus by Davies and between CREA and Corpus del Español by Davies in the wikipage of our Language Resource class.

Finally, I will only say that people like Mark Davies are making possible the total expansion of Internet. With the creation of databases like corpuses of different languages, they are helping humanity. They are creating tools that could help from linguists to students.