This chapter explores the impact that the recent technologies associated with Web 2.0 may have had on some specific genres. In particular, the chapter investigates the contribution of the technological affordances of Web 2.0 to the action of the centripetal and centrifugal forces of discourse (Bakhtin 1982), with reference to the case of Wikipedia, the well-known cooperative online encyclopaedia. The research hypothesis underlying the case studies reported in the chapter is that Wikipedia entries may not necessarily comply with generic conventions at the time of their creation, subject as they are to the centrifugal forces of individual creativity, but eventually do so in the long run by effect of the centripetal forces unleashed by the action of the Wikipedia community.

This paper reports on a work in progress whose aim is to explore how some tools, methods and data sets recently developed within corpus linguistics can be used to obtain not only information concerning language use but also fresh insights into culture. The background for the research can be found in a growing body of work in which the corpus linguistics approach has been profitably used to attain a deeper understanding of discourse and society, starting from Stubbs’s (2001) study of such words as “heritage”, “racial”, ”tribal”, to more recent research by Mahlberg (2007) and Pearce (2008), to mention a few contributions in this field. It is also important to mention the increasing interest in studies which integrate Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (e.g. Baker 2006). However, while supporting Corpus Linguistics as a research domain that is increasingly meeting the challenge of tackling issues relating to discourse and society, this paper also aims at exploring the specific potential and limitations – in this respect - of tools and resources that have been developed within Corpus Linguistics under the impact of the web. In order to achieve its aim the paper investigates the behaviour of culture, a notoriously “difficult” word (Williams 1983, 87), using the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), a corpus query tool which is able to extract and sum up linguistic information from large corpora. The “sketch” obtained for culture from ukWaC, a 1.5 billion word web corpus of English, is briefly analysed and discussed, and attention is focused on areas for further investigation.

In this article the web’s controversial nature as a corpus is explored on both theoretical and applicative grounds. More specifically, the article shows how the notion of the web as corpus has changed, during the past decade, the way we conceive of a corpus from the somewhat reassuring standards subsumed under the corpus-as-body metaphor, to a new more flexible and challenging corpus-as-web image. On the one hand the traditional notion of a linguistic corpus as a body of texts rests on some correlate issues such as finite size, balance, part-whole relationship, permanence; on the other hand the very idea of a web of texts brings about notions of non-finiteness, flexibility, de-centering and re-centering, and provisionality. In terms of methodology, this questions issues which could be taken for granted when working with traditional corpora such as the stability of the data, the reproducibility of the research, and the reliability of the results, but has also created the conditions for the development of specific tools that try to make the ‘webscape’ a more hospitable space for corpus research. By simply reworking the output format of ordinary search engines to make it suitable for linguistic analysis (e.g. WebCorp, KWiCFinder), or by allowing the creation of quick flexible small specialized and customized multilingual corpora form the web (e.g. BootCaT), or by crawling more ‘controlled’ parts of the web for the creation of large web corpora (e.g. Wacky project, Google Books NGram Viewer), recently developed tools and resources are decidedly redirecting the way we conceive of corpus work in the new Millennium along those lines envisaged by Martin Wynne as characterizing linguistic resources in the 21st century, such as multilinguality, dynamic content, distributed architecture, virtual corpora, connection with web search (Wynne 2002: 1204).