A Corpus for Intercultural Comparison of Web Sites

Abstract

The scientific comparison of intercultural differences of Web sites lacks a standardized collection for which results can be reproduced. Results are often anecdotal and based on few items which change very dynamically. We developed a corpus of Web sites from different cultures for future research which is stored and which can be accessed through an interface developed for that purpose. We show how the preconditions for corpora as they are well known in linguistics and retrieval are adopted for international Web design research. The collection policy is described. The challenges for Web crawling and storing pages are discussed.