Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2017

From 17th to 21st July, I volunteered and participated part-time at the Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2017, managed by Dr Florent Perek, at the University of Birmingham.  As part of my role, I assisted at the group events, answering questions and keeping full-time participants up to speed with the instructions from the presenters.  Interestingly, in my spare time, I was able to attend some of the sessions from the guest speakers throughout the week.  

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Dr Bodo Winter introducing 'R' corpus analysis software

The first workshop was from Dr Bodo Winter, introducing the basics of 'R', a corpus analysis software. After hearing so much about the capabilities of 'R' from Bodo in our dissertation supervision sessions, I was eager to find out more about this software.  'R' is very useful for linguists to run statistical tests; T-test, chi-square, and ANOVA, among others.  ​Between assisting other participants to navigate their way around the 'R' interface, under Bodo's instruction, I discovered coding could be a lot more fun than I thought!  

The week followed with explorations of other corpus software, including CPQweb and WordSmith. Some of the programs I was already familiar with: ELAN, which I had used to annotate audio videos of teacher-student interactions as part of the Undergraduate Research Scholarship (UGRS); and the

UAM Corpus Tool, used to annotate visual resources such as advertisements, that I came across ​while coding my dissertation corpus of multimodal mobile phone advertisements.  It was most helpful to pick up some tips on how to use these programs, realising more of their potential.  Thank you to Dr Adam Schembri and Dr Matteo Fuoli for their workshops on this software.
 

Dr Adam Schembri talking about the British Sign Language corpus using the ELAN corpus software

The week of learning and academic discussion was made sweeter with regular coffee breaks (familiar to all academics, I'm sure) and the Corpus Linguistics Summer School barbecue!  These breaks offered everyone an opportunity to network, resulting in numerous stimulating discussions with a multicultural group of people.  For those academics, or budding academics like myself, interested in corpus linguistics or looking for another way to analyse a larger dataset, I would definitely recommend this Summer School for a wealth of inspiration and instruction.

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Copyright © Samantha Ford 2017-2018