The ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences was inaugurated in 2013; the 2014 event is the second in the series. It will take place 15th to 18th July 2014, at Lancaster University, UK.
This free-to-attend summer school takes place under the aegis of CASS (https://cass.lancs.ac.uk), an ESRC research centre bringing a new method in the study of language – the corpus approach – to a range of social sciences. CASS is investigating the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education.
Who can attend?
A crucial part of the CASS remit is to provide researchers across the social sciences with the skills needed to apply the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics to the research questions that matter in their own discipline. This event is aimed at junior social scientists – especially PhD students and postdoctoral researchers – in any of the social science disciplines. Anyone with an interest in the analysis of social issues via text and discourse – especially on a large scale – will find this summer school of interest.
Programme
The programme consists of a series of intensive two-hour sessions, some involving practical work, others more discussion-oriented.
Topics include: Introduction to corpus linguistics; Corpus tools and techniques; Collecting corpus data; Foundational techniques for social science data – keywords and collocation; Understanding statistics for corpus analysis; Discourse analysis for the social sciences; Semantic annotation and key domains; Corpus-based approaches to metaphor in discourse; Pragmatics, politeness and impoliteness in the corpus.
Speakers include Tony McEnery, Paul Baker, Jonathan Culpeper, and Elena Semino.
The CASS Summer School is one of the three co-located Lancaster Summer Schools in Interdisciplinary Digital Methods; see the website for further information:
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/summerschool
How to apply
The CASS Summer School is free to attend, but registration in advance is compulsory, as places are limited.
The deadline for registrations is Sunday 8th June 2014.
The application form is available on the event website as is further information on the programme.