Rose Hendricks, a researcher at the Frameworks Institute in Washington D.C., shares her experience of taking the CorpusMOOC:

‘I’m a social science researcher and have been curious for a while how we can learn more about human culture and cognition by looking at large collections of language — so I jumped at the opportunity to take the Corpus Linguistics online course by Lancaster University.

The course had an great mix of videos, readings, and activities, and covered topics in just the right amount of detail. There was enough information to get a good sense of how corpus linguistics methods can be used in a huge range of ways, from addressing questions in sociolinguistics to developing textbooks, dictionaries, and resources for language learners.

Conversations with researchers who use corpus linguistics methods gave us an even deeper sense of the interesting and important topics that benefit from tools to extract patterns from huge amounts of text.

Throughout the course, I came up with many ideas I plan to explore with the methods we learned about, especially #LancsBox, a tool that helps researchers analyze and visualize their language data.

I would recommend this course to people with any level of background knowledge on the topic — there’s something for everyone.’