About Corpus

Our corpus holds over 10,000 texts produced by undergraduate students in first year writing. Students represented in the corpus come from over 50 different countries and are majoring across over 100 programs.

Information on the the context in which each text was produced include:

• year and semester the text was written
• course for which the text was written
• assignment of each text (e.g., argumentative paper, genre analysis, literature review)
• draft of each text
• relevant demographic information of the students (gender, country of origin, program and major, TOEFL score, etc.)

In addition to our corpus, our repository holds 380 instructional materials linked to the texts represented in the corpus, including:

• In-class activity handouts, homework assignments, and peer review activities
• Assignment sheets/prompts for major assignments
• Lesson plans and presentation slides
• Grading rubrics (scales) for major assignments
• Sample papers used during instruction
• Course syllabi, schedules and policies

Demographic data included in Crow’s corpus come from institutional data where participants are enrolled and/or employed. We recognize that these institutions’ current decisions to categorize gender as binary and country of origin as singular do not fully reflect the complexity of our participants’ identities and backgrounds, and we support advocacy for more inclusive and nuanced institutional data.

To request access to the Crow corpus & repository, review our terms and conditions, then complete the access request form. Please allow five business days for review.

Download a subset of the texts available in the online corpus. This option is intended for users who would like to use the corpus for their own research, particularly if they Note: additional training and verification is required.

For researchers who would like to annotate the corpus, use concordancing software (e.g., Antconc or LancsBox), or create their own programs to analyze the data, we have prepared an offline version. This subset of the Crow corpus has been curated by the Crow team to ensure a representative sample from the first year writing context. Additional training is required for offline use.

Using our corpus? Cite us:

Staples, S., & Dilger, B. (2018-). Corpus and repository of writing [Learner corpus articulated with repository]. Available at https://crow.corporaproject.org

Description of the corpus