The Origins of New Zealand English project (ONZE) at the University of Canterbury houses a large audio corpus. Until a few years ago, this corpus was stored as a series of audio tapes and Microsoft Word documents. However, the corpus is now housed on a central server, and can be interacted with through the tailor-made software ‘ONZE Miner’. ONZE Miner is a digitally-interactive database that enables researchers to search across and interact with sound files. It houses time-aligned transcripts of the sound-files, which are tagged for phonological, grammatical and morphological information – all of which is searchable. The researcher can conduct acoustic analysis of sound files directly through the ONZE Miner interface. Search results can be exported into Excel, together with hypertext links to the relevant sound files. This paper describes the development and the architecture of the ONZE Miner software.
