My current university cannot provide the required infrastructure (in terms of data center resources and staff) at a reasonable cost that would allow me to offer the COW corpora to a wider audience. Individual institutions can get access to the data, but COW is unable to provide access via a platform with installations of NoSketch Engine, RStudio, etc. Furthermore, difficulties with the only suitable and freely available corpus query engine (the aforementioned NoSketch Engine) – largely due to the fact that it’s practically undocumented – created a workload that we could no longer afford. After Felix Bildhauer and I paid for the server out of our own pockets from 2014 to 2024, we finally took it offline.

Contact me directly if you need access to the data and are able to manage large text corpora yourself.