Abstract Swiss-AL (Swiss Applied Linguistics) is a language data platform for the applied sciences developed at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences. It enables multilingual and comparative discourse analyses with a focus on Switzerland. Accessible at www.swiss-al.zhaw.ch, the platform contains publicly available documents from collective actors in politics, industry, civil society, science and journalistic media in all four language regions of Switzerland. The documents are processed as linguistic corpora and made available as an open research data resource using corpus linguistic methods in a specially developed browser-based workbench. Swiss-AL is intended for researchers from various scientific disciplines who work with language data to address practical problems (e.g. applied linguistics, social sciences, psychology, public health and strategic communication). The following article first outlines the purpose and genesis of Swiss-AL, then presents its theoretical foundations and composition, including the corpora hosted on the platform and their technical implementation, before discussing Swiss-AL as a resource for open research data with particular attention to the implementation of the FAIR principles and to the functionalities, access conditions and usability of the browser-based workbench. Finally, it describes the accompanying documentation and open educational resources as well as selected usage scenarios.
Krasselt et al. (Tue,) studied this question.