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A new addition to the Brown Family: BE21
Back in the 1960s, the Brown Corpus was the first corpus ever created – 1 million words of written standard American English from 15 registers, across 500 text samples, all around 2,000 words in size. Since then, there have been matched versions to cover the 1930s, the 1990s and the 2000s. Today’s reference corpora can…
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Anxiety support in an online forum
Anxiety is a growing, worldwide phenomenon. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 264 million people living with anxiety disorders, which are characterised by excessive fear and behavioural disturbances, and which include specific phobias, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. In this project, we investigate an online forum dedicated to providing…
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Representing trans people in the UK press – a follow-up study
I do not identify as trans, nor did I carry out this research for profit or because I am an activist. I approached the subject from the position of allowing the data to speak for itself, and the corpus methods I use rely on computational techniques that are unbiased – computer software identifies the most…
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CASS at Corpus Linguistics 2017
The biennial Corpus Linguistics conference first took place in 2001 at Lancaster, with the 2017 conference at Birmingham being its 9th outing. Lasting four days with an additional day for workshops, this blog post details CASS participation at the event. On Monday 24th July CASS ran two pre-conference workshops: Vaclav Brezina and Matt Timperley’s workshop…
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Beyond the checkbox – understanding what patients say in feedback on NHS services
In 2016 I will be working on a new project in CASS, which has received funding from the ESRC (£61,532 FEC). The purpose of this project is to help the National Health Service better understand the results of patient feedback so that they can improve their services. The NHS gathers a great deal of user…
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Sino-UK Corpus Linguistics Summer School
At the end of July, Tony McEnery and I taught at the second Sino-UK corpus linguistics summer school, arranged between CASS and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It was my first time visiting China and we arrived during an especially warm season with temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius (we were grateful for the air conditioning in…
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The Scottish referendum – did it unite the Guardian and the Mail?
The Guardian and the Mail are very different newspapers. The Guardian is a left-leaning liberal broadsheet while the Mail is a more popular right-leaning ‘middle-market’ newspaper. Generally, they can be relied on to disagree with one another on a range of social, economic and political issues. However, both newspapers supported the recent “No” campaign during…
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CASS visit to Ghana
On June 24th, I and three other members of CASS spent a week in Accra, Ghana, demonstrating corpus methods and our own research at two universities, the University of Ghana and the recently established Lancaster University Ghana campus in Accra. From the UK it’s just over a six hour flight although thankfully only one hour…
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Using Corpora to Analyze Gender
I wrote UCAG during a sabbatical as a semi-sequel to a book I published in 2006 called Using Corpora for Discourse Analysis. Part of the reason for the second book was to update and expand some of my thinking around discourse- or social-related corpus linguistics. As time has passed, I haven’t become disenamoured of corpus methods,…
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Discourse, Gender and Sexuality South-South Dialogues Conference
Last week was spent in at Witwatersrand (Wits) University in Johannesburg where I had been invited to give a workshop on corpus methods, as well as a talk on some of my own research. The week was topped off by the first Discourse, Gender and Sexuality South-South Dialogues Conference which was organised by Tommaso Milani. Many of…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.