This chapter begins with a general discussion of potential data types in variationist linguistics. Next, we present the two main data sources we use in the study: the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the Global Corpus of Web-Based English (GloWbE). The former comprises a set of parallel, balanced corpora representative of language usage across a wide range of standard national varieties. Each ICE corpus contains 500 texts of 2000 words each, sampled from twelve spoken and written genres/registers, totaling approx. 1 million words. GloWbE contains data collected from 1.8 million English language websites – both blogs and general web pages – from twenty different countries (approx. 1.8 billion words in all). Discussion of the corpora is followed by a detailed description of the data collection, identification, and annotation procedures for our three alternations. Here we carefully define the variable context for each alternation, and outline the methods for coding various linguistic constraints that are included in our analyses.

Bioinformatics is discussed in Chapter 11. The complex nature of the subject and its interaction with other disciplines are outlined, and the inter-dependence of bioinformatics, the development of computer hardware and the internet is stressed. The nature and range of biological databases are outlined, from the inception of nucleic acid databases in the 1970s to the present breadth of primary and secondary databases that are repositories for information on nucleic acid and protein sequences, interactions between cellular components, biochemical pathways, pharmacological targets and many other data sets derived from existing information. Genome sequence databases are used to illustrate the tools needed to assemble, collate, annotate and interrogate the data, and the impact of bioinformatics in enabling experiments and protocols to to be conducted in silico is discussed.