Lancaster University’s ESRC funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and Cambridge University Press are excited to announce the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 Early Access Data Grant scheme.
Applications are now open for researchers at any level in the field of corpus linguistics and beyond to gain early access to a large subset of the Spoken BNC2014, which is currently being compiled and is due for release in late 2017. Successful applicants will write a paper based on their proposed research for exclusive publication (subject to peer review) in either a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics or an edited collection.
We invite proposals for interesting and innovative research that would use approximately five million words of the upcoming Spoken BNC2014 as its primary source of data.
Successful applicants will gain access to the data via the CQPweb platform (cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk). Standard CQPweb functionality will be provided, including annotation (POS tagging, lemmatisation, semantic tagging) and with one new feature: the ability to search the corpus according to categories of speaker metadata such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status.
Proposals can approach the data from any theoretical angle, provided corpus methodologies are used and the research can be carried out within the affordances of CQPweb. Successful applicants will receive access to the data in February 2016 with a deadline for full paper submission in October 2016. Subject to peer review, papers will be published in one of the two Spoken BNC2014 launch publications in 2017 (a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics has been agreed and a thematic edited collection is being planned).
This is a fantastic opportunity to work with the first very large, general corpus of informal British English conversation created since the original BNC more than twenty years ago. Successful applicants will get access to a large subset of the Spoken BNC2014 eighteen months before the full corpus is released, and will be the very first scholars to undertake and publish research based on this new dataset.
More details about the terms of the data grant scheme can be found in the application form. To apply, download and complete the application form and email it to Robbie Love (r.m.love@lancaster.ac.uk). The deadline for applications is Friday 11th December 2015.
A PhD is certainly not easy — I’ve heard it compared to giving birth, starting and ending a relationship, riding a rollercoaster, making a lonely journey, and more. I relocated across the world from Australia to begin mine, and the start was marked by the sadness of a death in the family. It’s been a whirlwind ever since; throughout the course of my degree, I taught as much as possible, I researched and published outside the scope of my PhD, and in April 2013, I began full-time work in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science.