Official launch of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science

The official opening of the ยฃ4.1 million ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) took place on Tuesday, 23 July 2013, at the start of the seventh international Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference attended by more than 300 delegates. Delegates representing dozens of universities around the world convened with civil servants toย honour the past, promote theย present, and celebrate the future of corpus methods in the social sciences.

Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke was among several special guests at the launch event including representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Environment Agency. Mr. Clarke said a few words to the audience of scholars and other users of research, stressing the importance of investigating language in the context of society, as well as continuing to foster and nurture interdisciplinary collaborative links in social science research.

With such a large and influential crowd gathered, we took the opportunity toย showcase aย variety of new and exciting research featuring corpus methodsย applied to the social sciences to a wide network of people. A range of researchers from Lancaster and much further afield were invited to give poster presentations highlighting their current work, which offers a variety of exciting contributions ranging fromย methodological advances to increasedย social understanding, and greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity inย academia. Poster presenters includedย Mike Scott,ย Alan Partington,ย Ute Rรถmer,ย Kevin Harvey,ย Elena Semino, Veronika Koller,ย Ramesh Krishnamurthy,ย Alan Partington,ย Alison Sealey, Andrew Salway, Paul Rayson, Steve Young,ย Jonathan Culpeper,ย Paul Baker,ย Rachelle Vessey,ย Charlotte Taylor,ย Anna Marchi,ย Catherine Chorley,ย Costas Gabrielatos, andย Robbie Love. The posters proved great fodder for stimulating conversation about the future potentials of corpus linguistics and corpus approaches to social science.

Click below to see the full gallery of photos from the evening.