2018Q3 Reports: SIGWAC

General

The Special Interest Group on the Web as Corpus (SIGWAC) has 180 members as of 1 July 2018 (based on the number of subscriptions to the SIGWAC mailing list). The SIGWAC community keeps in touch through its mailing list (http://devel.sslmit.unibo.it/mailman/listinfo/sigwac) and the SIGWAC home page (http://sigwac.org.uk/).

The SIGWAC board

Chair: Roland Schäfer (http://rolandschaefer.net/) Researcher at Freie Universität Berlin

Secretary: Egon W. Stemle (http://iiegn.eu/work/) Researcher at European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano

The current board serves from 1 Aug 2015 to 31 July 2018. An election is being organised as of 5 July 2018.

The future of SIGWAC and the 12th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-XII)

The 12th Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-XII) did not take place in 2018. The SIG has been discussing how to make the WAC events more attractive to a larger community in order to ensure a steady high number of high-quality submissions after a series of years with strongly varying numbers of submissions and varying turnouts. Among the points discussed (on the SIG's mailing list) were a possible bi-annual mode for WAC events and the future direction of SIGWAC. Some members opted for a more linguistic focus which would attract corpus users to WAC events, while others favoured a more strongly computational future direction. It will be the task of the newly elected board and the future WAC-XII organisers to determine the future direction of SIGWAC through further open discussion.