Any empirical study of language use is ultimately reliant upon linguistics data, and is commonly (but not necessarily) associated with linguistic corpora or other kinds of databases representing samples of natural language use. The goal of this chapter is to cover more precisely what is involved when we speak about collecting and maintaining linguistics data sets for scientific purposes. This includes covering the history of the topic in linguistics and beyond, but especially focusing on aspects that have become particularly relevant since the digital turn, in other words, since digital technologies have evolved that allow non-data-scientists to collect, analyze and preserve unprecedentedly large data sets on their own with readily available technology. Nowadays, most people with a bit of training can use their own personal computers and freely available software to work with large sets of digital data throughout the process, from collection and analysis to preservation. While we highlight aspects that are particularly relevant for pragmatics, much of this presentation is equally valid for other fields that collect or analyze usage-based linguistic data, or indeed any other fields working with empirical data collected as a sample of human behavior related to language and communication. After this introductory section, we cover some of the most important concepts (data and metadata, legal aspects, ethical aspects, data formats, versioning, digitization, archiving, discoverability, reproducibility and citation).

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