The constitution of COSER owes much to the important role played by successive
generations of students (more than thirty now!) who, since 1989-1990, have
participated with enthusiasm and curiosity in the field work trips and have made the
recordings the subject of their course work, transcribing and analysing them.
Among them, I must highlight those who have repeated, tripled or quadrupled or more,
simply out of interest in dialectology, offering their experience to ensure the
success of the surveys by accompanying the new "novice" batches of subsequent courses,
or those who signed up for the extraordinary campaigns (outside the fieldwork activity)
during the summer within the framework of research projects: all their names
appear in fair recognition in the list of
survey campaigns
and in the
available files.
Students and collaborators
Above all, I must highlight a group of former UAM students who have been particularly involved in COSER,
working as collaborators in the project. Among them are those who transcribed recordings for the first
research projects: especially
José Ignacio Sanjuán Astigarraga and
María José Gonzaléz Arévalo
(1991-1993, 1994-1995).
Javier Rodríguez
Molina also received a Collaboration Grant during the 2001-2002 academic year, thanks to which it was possible to create a database with all the information concerning COSER (archive information, interviewers, informants, surveyed sites, dates, duration of the recordings, etc.). He also created the first general map of COSER, showing all the localities interviewed so far. Cristina
García Sánchez
worked as a grant holder for the Teaching Innovation Project
"Archivo sonoro de español hablado"
(2003), digitalising 290 hours of COSER recordings and preparing the first sound archives for this website, as well as creating a database with information regarding the transcriptions. Enrique Pato, as Contracted Research Staff under the project
"Sintaxis dialectal del español peninsular"
during 2004, was in charge of finalising the first version of this website, preparing many of its files (updating and revising the general map, elaboration of the provincial maps, list of campaigns, transcription of all the sound samples and the selection of many of them), as well as reviewing all the others. From 2010 to 2014, Carlota de Benito Moreno and Víctor Lara Bermejo, as pre-doctoral fellows, collaborated in a decisive way in the projects "Variación y cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular" (2010-2012) and "Procesos de cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular" (2013-2015), while preparing their theses on aspects of syntactic variation. The improvements that COSER has undergone in recent years owe much to their organisation, hard work and enthusiasm. Over the past decade, Beatriz Martín Izquierdo (2011-2014, 2016-2017), Sara García Motilla (2011), Ana Estrada Arráez (2013-2014), Piedad Puchades Muñoz (2015), Gema Herranz Martínez (2016) and Isabel-Clara Muñoz Briongos (2018) have also worked at COSER with unwavering dedication as part-time contract transcription editors. In the last five years, this work has been reinforced by Olga León Zurdo (2015-2017), Gema Herranz Martínez (2016-2020), Jorge Agulló González (2017-), Isabel-Clara Muñoz Briongos (2021-), as pre-doctoral contract researchers, and Alba Aires Salvador (2018-2020) and Roxana Denisa Marica (2020-2023) as Research Assistants. From the University of Salamanca, Borja Alonso Pascua (2019) has generously contributed to the increase of the corpus.
Computer development
Since 2010, the COSER transcriptions have benefited from the BConcord editor, developed specifically by Bautista Horcajada, Professor of Linguistics at the Complutense University of Madrid, which makes it possible to edit the materials with a system of standardised tags and to combine text and sound. The digitalisation of all the materials and their organisation into a computer-structured corpus are also possible thanks to the advice provided by Bautista Horcajada, who deserves his own section in the acknowledgements. The tools developed have allowed us to take a giant step forward in the processing of the materials and their availability for search.
Since 2016, thanks to the advice of CSIC Senior Scientist Javier Pueyo Mena, the previously developed editor has been adapted to an online editing system, which allows centralised transcription with different user and access permissions. In addition, Javier Pueyo has adapted the set of Freeling libraries to the characteristics of an oral corpus, which has made it possible to develop the Advanced Search. This Search mode offers the possibility of interrogating the corpus in a complex way through morphosyntactic tags and lemmas and, from 2020, downloading the results of the searches in Excel, with the geographical coordinates and postcode of the localities.
Thanks to the generosity of Professor Hiroto Ueda from the University of Tokyo, it is possible to interrogate the COSER transcriptions also with the LYNEAL programme, which allows for form comparison and mapping functions that neither the Basic Search nor the Advanced Search offer.
Javier Pueyo, in 2018, and Álvaro Bueno, in 2021, have worked on the automatic synchronisation of the sound materials with the text transcriptions, which has enabled the retrieval of the sound fragment together with the searched textual sequence in the Advanced Search.
The project "A Respeaking and Collaborative Game-Based Approach to Building a Parsed Corpus of European Spanish Dialects" (FWO Medium-scale research infrastructure project, Grant Number I000418N), of which Professor Miriam Bouzouita is principal investigator, has subsidised part of this synchronisation. Within this projesct, a syntactic parser is being developed using COSER. The parser is the objective of the doctoral thesis of Johnatan Bonilla, from the Universities of Ghent /Humboldt zu Berlin.
Finally, in 2021, COSER has been made available for download in open access, both in txt and xml tagged format.
Colleagues
In expressing gratitude, it is impossible to forget all those colleagues who, in one way or another, have recognised or supported COSER's constituent activities and the research associated with it. At the Autonomous University of Madrid, all the colleagues in the Department of Spanish Philology and, in particular, those who form or have formed part of the projects related to COSER (Diego Catalán, Javier Elvira, Marina Fernández, Javier García Juan Ramón Lodares, Azucena Palacios, José Portolés, Ana Serradilla, Santiago U. Sánchez, Jacinto González Cobas), as well as the former coordinator of the Audiovisual and Multimedia Resources Unit (María Luisa Ortega) and Álvaro Ortigosa (Escuela Superior de Informática). The support of the Director of Research Infrastructures of the UAM, Ángel Muñoz Martín has been fundamental for COSER to be hosted on a server at the Scientific Computing Centre (Centro de Computación Científica). Colleagues from other universities provided technical advice on various issues, such as the digitalisation of the files (José Manuel Blecua, Joaquim Llisterri and Eduardo Uriós, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), the creation of the maps with Geographic Information Systems (Ignacio Zabala, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) or the statistical analysis of the data (María José Medrano, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Pilar Guzmán, UAM).
Within Spain, Cristina Matute (Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus), Daniel Sáez, Edita Gutiérrez and Raquel González Rodríguez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Araceli López Serena, Lola Pons (Universidad de Sevilla), Bruno Camus (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), Andrés Enrique-Arias and Ruth Miguel Franco (Universitat de les Illes Balears) have participated directly in COSER activities. And from outside Spain, COSER has always enjoyed the support, collaboration and interest of David Heap (University of Western Ontario, Canada), Flora Klein-Andreu (State University of New York, United States of America), Iván Ortega-Santos (University of Memphis, USA), Pilar Larrañaga (University of Wuppertal, Germany), Mónica Castillo Lluch, Elena Díez del Corral Areta and Cristina Peña Rueda (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta (CSIC), Miriam Bouzouita (Humboldt University of Berlin), Irene Salvo García (UAM) and Paul O'Neill (University of Sheffield, UK).
A separate and very important chapter in these acknowledgements is dedicated to the former students, later doctoral students and now university professors, who continue to collaborate in the surveys, the development of the corpus and the obtaining of funding: Carlota de Benito (University of Zurich), Ana Estrada (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Enrique Pato (University of Montreal).
And the surveys of the Canary Islands (2016-2019) and Mallorca (2017) were made possible thanks to the generous financial and human contribution of professors Miriam Bouzouita, Mónica Castillo Lluch and Andrés Enrique-Arias, who not only obtained funding for their implementation, but also involved their students and research groups.
Finally, collaboration with speakers and professors of other Iberian languages has made it possible to improve the transcription of bilingual speakers. Among them, I must mention, for her special dedication, Maria Pilar Perea Sabater, from the University of Barcelona, and Eloi Belles Boeta, who have revised many fragments in Catalan. A detailed revisión of fragments in Galicia has also been untertaken by Mariña Ferreiro Vilariño (University of Santiago de Compostela).
Institutional support
Under the heading of institutional support (see Funding), the Autonomous University of Madrid (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, UAM) figures prominently, financing the dialectology field trips on which many of COSER's materials have been collected. The UAM has also supported COSER's constitution in other ways. Firstly, through the granting of three projects: a research project for Pre-competitive Groups (1991-1993) and two others for Teaching Innovation (2003, 2004-2005). The first made it possible to organise the survey campaigns of the summers of 1991, 1992 and 1993, as well as the transcription as text files of some of the materials collected. The second made it possible to undertake an initial digitisation of 290 hours of recordings and to produce the first version of this website (2005-2015). The digitisation and Internet access work continued throughout the 2004-2005 academic year, thanks to the third of the above-mentioned projects, at the Audio-visual and Multimedia Resources Unit (URAM) of the UAM. The UAM's Computer Linguistics Laboratory has hosted the project's website since 2015 and, finally, the UAM's Scientific Computing Centre has set up a server to host the database and the online editor.
COSER has also received support from other entities: the Autonomous Community of Madrid granted a research project that allowed the transcription of the recorded materials to continue (1994-1995), and the Ministry of Science and Technology subsidised, as part of the project "Sintaxis dialectal del español peninsular", the computerisation of some of the transcriptions and the unitary revision of the transcriptions (2004).The "Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture du Québec" (FQRSC) of the Quebec Ministry of Education (Canada) and the "Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada" have also contributed to the revision of the COSER transcriptions thanks to the projects "Corpus de la syntaxe dialectale de l'espagnol péninsulaire" (2007-2010) and "Syntaxe dialectale de l'espagnol" (May 2010-May 2013), directed by Enrique Pato. In 2013, the process of digitisation of all the materials and the revision of the transcriptions of 150 hours, representative of all the provinces contained in the COSER, was completed thanks to the research project " Variación y cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular" (2010-2012), subsidised by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, with which the project was integrated into the European network EDISYN (European Dialect Syntax), coordinated by the Dutch professor Sief Barbiers. A Complementary Action of the Ministry of Science "Campaña final de encuestas para el Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural" (2012-2013) made possible four extraordinary surveys to complete the sample of recordings in Andalusia, Murcia and Levante.
In the framework of the project "Procesos de cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular" (2013-2015), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the transcriptions were increased with 21 interviews, the design of this website was updated, and a search engine (Basic Search) was developed that allows the transcriptions to be interrogated and the results to be mapped. As part of the activities foreseen in the Network of Excellence "Nuevos recursos para el estudio de la variación dialectal del español" (2015-2017), also funded by this Ministry, 26 hours were added to the transcriptions available in the corpus and in the tagging of the main aspects of grammatical variation that these materials offer. The project " Cambio gramatical en el español europeo: problemas teóricos y avances empíricos" (2016-2018), funded by the same Ministry, made it possible to make further progress in the transcription of the materials (24 hours of recording) and, above all, in making them more accessible. Thus, after adapting the set of Freeling libraries, the corpus was labelled and lemmatised, and a search engine was developed to enable complex interrogation of the materials (Advanced Search), with mapping and the possibility of downloading the materials in Excel. Finally, within the project "Cambios en el habla rural: del siglo XX (Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica, ALPI) al siglo XXI (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural, COSER)", funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, work has continued on increasing the number of transcriptions on the website, 28 between 2019 and 2021, and above all, on the correction of those already available (46 have undergone an in-depth revision) and on the revision of the automatic synchronisation of 114 localities (in which there were errors of varying degrees).
