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Introducing Challenge Panel Member: Fiona Farr
We are happy to announce Dr Fiona Farr’s membership on the CASS Challenge Panel. Dr Fiona Farr is Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where she is also a member of the Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS), and the Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies (IVACS) Research Group. Her background is…
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CASS affiliated papers to be given at the upcoming 5th International Language in the Media Conference
In two weeks, several scholars affiliated with the Centre will be heading south to attend the 5th International Language in the Media Conference, taking place this year at Queen Mary, University of London. We are particularly excited about the theme — “Redefining journalism: Participation, practice, change” — as well as the conference’s continued prioritization of papers on…
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The New General Service List (new-GSL) is out
The new-GSL is an English vocabulary baseline intended for both researchers and practitioners. It is based on robust comparison of four corpora of general English of the total size of over 12 billion words. It contains 2,494 vocabulary items, 2,116 of which belong to a stable lexical core; 378 words in the wordlist represent lexical…
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Visiting With The Brown Family
In 2011 I gave a plenary talk on how American English is changing over time (contrasting it with British English), using the Brown Family of corpora. Each member of the Brown family consists of a corpus of 1 million words of written, published, standard English, divided into 500 files each of about 2000 words each.…
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Introducing Challenge Panel Member: Mark Davies
Next in our series of Challenge Panel announcements, we are pleased to introduce Mark Davies (creator of the COCA, COHA, and TIME Magazine corpora, among others). Mark Davies received his PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the Univ. Texas at Austin in 1992, and then taught Spanish at Illinois State University until 2003, when he came to…
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Introducing Challenge Panel Member: Stefan Th. Gries
Following the first meeting last month of our Challenge Panel, we are pleased to introduce the esteemed members, in their own words. First up: Stefan Gries. I am currently a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as well as Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen…
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ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Science 2013: feedback
In the week of 16th – 19th July 2013, CASS organised the first Summer school for PhD students and post-doctoral researchers in social science disciplines with an interest in the methods of corpus linguistics. Twenty participants from 15 different Higher Education institutions form the UK and overseas (Israel, Brazil, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy) attended the…
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Writing for the press: the deleted scenes
In late July and early August 2013, the stories of Caroline Criado-Perez, the bomb threats, and latterly, the horrific tragedy of Hannah Smith broke across the media, and as a result, the behaviour supposedly known as “trolling” was pitched squarely into the limelight. There was the inevitable flurry of dissections, analyses, and opinion pieces, and…
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.