# The Saudi Novel Corpus: Design and Compilation
## 1 Introduction  
Due to the evolution of the digital age, corpus linguistics has found its way in research communities and has proven valuable in language study in various ways in recent decades. Today, corpus linguistics has now established itself as a distinct discipline. The term corpus linguistics typically refers to two practices. It can refer to the practice of creating a (large) dataset that mirrors or represents the use of a language or one of its varieties. The term can also refer to the use of such a dataset to analyze and investigate various aspects of the language(s) under consideration [1, 2]. This paper focuses on the first practice. Corpora, as \"collection[s] of texts... stored in an electronic database\" [3], represent valuable resources for language documentation, Natural Language Process application, and linguistic analysis. Indeed, the use of corpus analysis is considered to be \"the most powerful empirical approach for analyzing the patterns of language use\" [4]. Although this approach is commonly used to analyze the linguistic components of language, such as lexis, grammar, or semantics, it has recently emerged as useful across interdisciplinary areas of research due to its successful interaction with different disciplines [5]. These include sociolinguistics [6, 7], discourse analysis [8], translation [9], literature [10], forensic studies [11], language teaching [12], and social media [13]. The intersection between corpus linguistics and literature recently formed its own interdisciplinary area of research called 'Corpus Stylistics' [4, 14]. In this area, the use of the techniques and tools of corpus linguistics in the study of literary texts, particularly novels, has proven fruitful. This successful achievement appears to be a result of this application's capacity to facilitatethe relatively objective examination of large data, which is computationally processed, in a systematic way [15]. Examples of existing studies include [16; 17; 18]. Although such an analysis practice has become popular among the research community of corpus linguistics and stylistics in English and some other languages, it has been ignored in the context of the Arabic language. This situation is likely due to the absence of a specialized corpus of texts that represent Arabic literature or its subgenres (e.g., novels), as shown in Section 2.3. Texts from the news genre, on the other hand, have been the primary focus of most Arabic corpus compilers. The central goal that the authors of this paper wish to achieve is to fill such a gap and contribute to the field of Arabic corpus stylistics, a neglected area of research. One crucial step that must be taken is to build a corpus that facilitates the studies of Arabic stylistics. Hence, this paper describes the processes we have taken and our decisions to create the Saudi Novel Corpus. Specifically, it presents the decisions we made regarding the design criteria of the corpus and the subsequent steps we followed to construct it. One might ask: Why do we need a specific corpus for Saudi novels? Apart from the gap highlighted above, we are motivated to compile such a corpus because of the following. Novels are one of the strongest features of the literary movement in Saudi Arabia, due to their artistic excellence, an abundance of production, and occupation of a prominent position at the cultural, media, and academic levels, both locally and in the broader Arab world [19]. One aspect of this prominent position is the dramatic increase in the number of Saudi novels in recent years: It is reported that approximately 1571 Saudi novels have been published over the last two decades [19]. This intense presence of the Saudi novel has drawn the attention of many researchers of Arabic literature and criticism to conduct numerous studies on different aspects of Saudi novels. According to [19], around 217 studies (printed as books) analyze the style of Saudi novels and their aesthetics and artistic and linguistic features.