The Victoria Climbié Corpus

This project builds on the work carried out in establishing the Victoria Climbié Inquiry Data Corpus at the University of Huddersfield. The project was funded by HEFCE's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the Enriching Digital Resources programme, a strand of the digitisation programme.

The main aim of the project is to make the coded and categorised Climbié corpus available to users via the University of Huddersfield repository. The Climbié data corpus includes all the transcriptions from the 68 days of oral evidence which was made available to the Project by the Department of Education and Skills. There is testimony from 168 witnesses, which produced over 5,200, single-spaced, A4 pages of evidence (approx. 2 million words).

These data are of central interest to researchers in child welfare, professional and legal studies, public administration and politics as well as teachers and students of a range of subjects, such as health care and social work, who deal with child welfare and to professionals needing to develop management and administrative skills in child welfare.

The project evaluated both the technical issues involved in depositing and making available a data set such as this and how it may be used effectively in teaching and learning with the key professions.