This is the first book of its kind to provide a practical and student-friendly guide to corpus linguistics that explains the nature of electronic data and how it can be collected and analyzed. * Designed to equip readers with the technical skills necessary to analyze and interpret language data, both written and (orthographically) transcribed * Introduces a number of easy-to-use, yet powerful, free analysis resources consisting of standalone programs and web interfaces for use with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux * Each section includes practical exercises, a list of sources and further reading, and illustrated step-by-step introductions to analysis tools * Requires only a basic knowledge of computer concepts in order to develop the specific linguistic analysis skills required for understanding/analyzing corpus data