This chapter describes the process of creating and annotating a corpus. This process involves, for instance, collecting data (speech and writing), transcribing recorded speech, and adding annotation, markup indicating in a conversation, for instance, when one person’s speech overlaps another speaker. While written texts are relatively easy to collect – most writing is readily available in digital formats – speech, especially spontaneous conversations, has to be transcribed, though voice recognition software has made progress in automating the transcription of certain kinds of speech, such as monologues. Other stages of building a corpus are also discussed, ranging from the administrative (keeping records of texts collected) to transcribing recordings of speech. The chapter concludes with a description of various kinds of textual markup and linguistic annotation that can be added to texts. Topics discussed include how to create a “header” for a particular text. Headers contain various kinds of information. For written texts, the header would include, for instance, the title of the text; the author(s); if published, where it was published. Other textual markup is internal to the text, and in a spoken text would include such information as speaker IDs, and the beginnings and ends of overlapping speech.

As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself felt: as web aggregators starting anthologizing poetry, selections from his work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities, in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as PennSound in Philadelphia, where parts of Pound’s work are presented and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload artwork inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural References in The Cantos’.