# The Saudi Novel Corpus: Design and Compilation
## 3 Design Criteria  
The present project aims to create a specialized and tagged corpus that reflects the language used in Saudi novels. This corpus will be available for research purposes (e.g., linguistics, stylistic research). To achieve this goal, the following design criteria, inspired mainly by [36; 52], were considered:Scope  
The scope of this corpus encompasses Saudi novels, as specified in the title. This is the core distinguishing criterion, separating it from other existing Arabic corpora. Therefore, we considered as the corpus population only those novels written by Saudi writers, regardless of where they were born, where they permanently live/lived, or where the novel was published. Hence, when a particular novel is produced by a Saudi writer but published outside Saudi Arabia, it is regarded as compatible with this criterion. In order to confidently meet this criterion, we relied mainly on the informative bibliographical study conducted by [53]. This study indexes only Saudi novelists and their contributions. Finally, it should be noted that the language used in Saudi novels is mainly MSA, a relatively unified variety of Arabic that is used across Arab countries and represents the official usage [54]. The use of some Arabic dialects can occur, although it is not a common practice. 2. Time Span  
The intended plan is to cover the period from 1930, when the first Saudi novel was published, until 2019. We focused specifically on the date of a novel's first publication, even if it is republished at later dates as well. This information is acquired via various sources including bibliographies, studies on Saudi novels, and personal communications with novelists and experts in the field. The application of this criterion is valuable because it will enable corpus users to conduct diachronic analysis and, hence, observe any historical changes that might have occurred in the language of Saudi novels. Furthermore, we decided to divide the period from 1930 to 2019 into decades to make diachronic analysis more feasible. 3. Sampling  
The full text of each novel collected is included in the corpus. This approach has a significant advantage, as it increases the likelihood of detecting the most linguistic characteristics [36]. Had the corpus only included a subset of each text (e.g., 5000 words), it would have excluded a great deal of important features, especially when targeting a particular genre (see: [55]). 4. Gender  
The corpus includes both male and female writers. Taking such a criterion into account is valuable, since it allows researchers to conduct comparative analyses between the linguistic and stylistic features of the language used by each gender. 5. Size  
The initial size of the corpus we intended to achieve is, at minimum, around 2,000,000 words. We set this size for two reasons: (i) to align with the time and fund limit given by the funder to the project team to accomplish the task, and (ii) to account for the difficulty of gaining and preprocessing the texts in a short time. In other words, most of the novels are not available in a machine-readable format, which will most likely require a lengthy procedure and a large sum of money for the human resources needed to obtain, edit, and preprocess the corpus data. However, we believe that this size represents a good deal of Saudi novels' linguistic and stylistic features, bearing in mind that we aimed to include texts that varied in terms of writer name, time period, and gender. Moreover, the size of the corpus can always be increased in subsequent phases. Finally, we would like to shed light on two intertwined notions related to corpora compilation. These are representativeness and balance. Representativeness refers to a status of a corpus when it contains a range of text types of the language or its variety. Hence, it usually includes different genres, periods, genders, ages, etc.