  This paper presents the first publicly available version of the Carolina
Corpus and discusses its future directions. Carolina is a large open corpus of
Brazilian Portuguese texts under construction using web-as-corpus methodology
enhanced with provenance, typology, versioning, and text integrality. The
corpus aims at being used both as a reliable source for research in Linguistics
and as an important resource for Computer Science research on language models,
contributing towards removing Portuguese from the set of low-resource
languages. Here we present the construction of the corpus methodology,
comparing it with other existing methodologies, as well as the corpus current
state: Carolina's first public version has $653,322,577$ tokens, distributed
over $7$ broad types. Each text is annotated with several different metadata
categories in its header, which we developed using TEI annotation standards. We
also present ongoing derivative works and invite NLP researchers to contribute
with their own.
