[1] The organisation was founded in Oslo, Norway in 1977 as the International Computer Archive of Modern English, before being renamed to its current title.
[4] The ICAME group hosts academic conferences that focus on corpus linguistic studies of historical changes and contemporary grammatical descriptions of English, and makes corpora of different varieties of English available to scholars, starting with editions of the 1960s Brown Corpus.
Their first academic conference was held in Bergen, Norway in 1979, and scholars who were interested in corpus linguistics continued to meet each spring in different European and English-speaking countries.
At these meetings, the compilation and distribution of corpora they enabled played a key role in the creation of the field of corpus linguistics in the 20th century, a precursor to current big data analytics.
[5] The influence of ICAME on the field has also be laid out in Facchinetti's history, Corpus Linguistics Twenty-five Years On.