Tag Archives: Robbie Love

Summer at SILK Road

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On Saturday 5th July I’ll be boarding a plane bound for Hong Kong once again this year, as I journey east for the SILK Road International Summer School. The programme, organised by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Faculty of Humanities, will put me and four other Lancaster University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences students through our paces as we complete two full credit-bearing university modules in the space of three weeks.

We’ll be spending the first week at Hong Kong PolyU’s campus before travelling to mainland China for two weeks at Jiaotong University in Xi’an, home of the famous Terracotta Army. There we will learn about Chinese culture, religion, geography and, of course, language. During our time outside the lecture halls we’ll be taken on a series of trips to visit places of interest in both Hong Kong and Xi’an.

The initials SILK stand for Study in an Intercultural Environment and Learn to be Kreative, so I will be back in a few weeks with an update on just how ‘kreative’ I have become!

Coming to CASS to code: The first two months

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After working at Waseda University in Japan for exactly 10 years, I was granted a one-year sabbatical in 2014 to concentrate on my corpus linguistics research. As my first choice of destination was Lancaster University, I was overjoyed to hear from Tony McEnery that the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) would be able to offer me office space and access to some of the best corpus resources in the world. I have now been at CASS for two months and thought this would be a good time to report on my experience here to date.

Since arriving at CASS, I have been working on several projects. My main project here is the development of a new database architecture that will allow AntConc, my freeware corpus analysis toolkit, to process very large corpora in a fast and resource-light way. The strong connection between the applied linguistics and computer science at Lancaster has allowed me to work closely with some excellent computer science faculty and graduate students, including Paul Rayson, John Mariani, Stephen Wattam, and John Vidler. We just presented our first results at LREC 2014 in Reykjavik.

I’ve also been working closely with the CASS members, including Amanda Potts and Robbie Love, to develop a set of ‘mini’ corpus tools to help with the collection, cleaning, and processing of corpora. I have now released VariAnt, which is a tool that finds spelling variants in a corpus, and SarAnt, which allows multiple search-and-replace functions to be carried out in a corpus as a batch process. I am also just about to release TagAnt, which will finally give corpus linguists a simple and intuitive interface to popular freeware Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging tools such TreeTagger. I am hoping to develop more of these tools to help the corpus linguists in CASS and around the world to help with the complex and time-consuming tasks that they have to perform each day.

I always expected that I would enjoy the time at Lancaster, but did not anticipate that I would enjoy it as much as I am. Lancaster University has a great campus, the research facilities are some of the best in the world, the CASS members have treated me like family since the day I arrived, and even the weather has been kind to me, with sunny days throughout April and May. I look forward to writing more about my projects here at CASS.

Dispatch from YLMP2014

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I recently had the pleasure of travelling to Poland to attend the Young Linguists’ Meeting in Poznań (YLMP), a congress for young linguists who are interested in interdisciplinary research and stepping beyond the realm of traditional linguistic study. Hosted over three days by the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, the congress featured over 100 talks by linguists young and old, including plenary lectures by Lancaster’s very own Paul Baker and Jane Sunderland. I was one of three Lancaster students to attend the congress, along with undergraduate Agnes Szafranski and fellow MA student Charis Yang Zhang.

What struck me about the congress, aside from the warm hospitality of the organisers, was the sheer breadth of topics that were covered over the weekend. All of the presenters were more than qualified to describe their work as linguistics, but perhaps for the first time I saw within just how many domains such a discipline can be applied. At least four sessions ran in parallel at any given time, and themes ranged from gender and sexuality to EFL and even psycholinguistics. There were optional workshops as well as six plenary talks. On the second day of the conference, as part of the language and society stream, I presented a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the UK national press reporting of the immediate aftermath of the May 2013 murder of soldier Lee Rigby. I was happy to have a lively and engaged audience who had some really interesting questions for me at the end, and I enjoyed the conversations that followed this at the reception in the evening!

What was most encouraging about the congress was the drive and enthusiasm shared by all of the ‘young linguists’ in attendance. I now feel part of a generation of young minds who are hungry to improve not only our own work but hopefully, in time, the field(s) of linguistics as a whole. After my fantastic experience at the Boya Forum at Beijing Foreign Studies University last autumn, I was happy to spend time again celebrating the work of undergraduate and postgraduate students, and early-career linguists. There was a willingness to listen, to share ideas, and to (constructively) criticise where appropriate, and as a result I left Poznań feeling very optimistic about the future of linguistic study. I look forward to returning to the next edition of YLMP, because from what I saw at this one, there is a new generation of linguists eager to push the investigation of language to the next level.

New CASS: Briefing now available — Opposing gay rights in UK Parliament: Then and now

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CASSbriefings-gayrightsOpposing gay rights in UK Parliament: Then and now. How has the expression of opposition to gay rights changed in Parliamentary speeches in recent years? How are discussions of gay people involved in these changes? To what extent could these arguments be seen as homophobic? Read this CASS: Briefing of a diachronic corpus-based discourse analysis to find out more.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

Introducing CASS 1+3 Research Student: Robbie Love

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In 2013, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science was pleased to award its inaugural 1+3 (Masters to PhD) studentship to Robbie Love. Read a bit about the first year of his postgraduate experience, in Robbie’s own words below.

robbieloveI am a Research Student at CASS in the first year of a 1+3 PhD studentship. My main role is to investigate methodological issues in the collection of spoken corpora, but I also have interests in corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis.

I grew up in the north east of England in Blyth, Northumberland and Forest Hall in the outskirts of Newcastle. At school I found equal enjoyment in studying both English language and mathematics, but when deciding what to take at university I couldn’t think of something that would satisfy both, so I went with language.

I moved to Lancaster in 2010 to study my BA in English Language, which I soon converted to Linguistics. It was only in my third year that I was introduced to corpus linguistics, and became fascinated with its potential for revealing things about the way we communicate which I would never have predicted. I also liked its combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, so it seemed like the perfect way to reengage with my enjoyment of maths. I had always been open to the idea of postgraduate study so when the opportunity came up to join CASS under the supervision of Tony McEnery it felt like the best thing for me to do.

Since joining CASS in the summer last year I have worked on several interesting projects including the changing language of gay rights opposition in Parliamentary debates (with Paul Baker), comments on online newspaper articles (with Amanda Potts), and the representation of Muslim people and Islam in the press reaction to the 2013 Woolwich incident (with Tony McEnery). I will be presenting findings on the Woolwich project at the upcoming Young Linguists’ Meeting in Poznań.

When I’m not playing with words on a computer, I am usually found rehearsing for a play or musical, playing my keyboard or eating any and all varieties of hummus.

For our People page for a full list of the centre’s investigators, researchers, and students.

Notes from the 3rd annual Boya Forum 2013 Undergraduate Conference

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If, six months ago, you had told me that an assignment I was writing during my undergraduate degree would eventually send me to China for the weekend, I wouldn’t have believed you. However, that is exactly what I found myself doing last weekend, when I travelled to Beijing Foreign Studies University to present at the 3rd annual Boya Forum 2013 undergraduate conference. I was one of two students from Lancaster University sent there to present at the event, which aimed to celebrate the undergraduate research abilities of students in the areas of English literature, translation studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies, international and area studies and, most relevant to my work, language studies. The participants represented a total of 27 universities, and coming from Lancaster I was from one of only three universities from outside of China; the others being Columbia University in New York and Rollins College in Florida.

The conference ran four concurrent panels of talks at any given time, meaning that in just one day we produced a total of 70 individual presentations. It was an intense day of talks and discussions that ran from the early morning right through into the evening, and my talk was right at the end of the day so I knew I would have a job of trying to keep my audience’s attention. I presented a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of a Parliament debate about the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, which seems to have been my party trick over the summer (I gave a poster of this at the Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference in July and presented about it at a PhD course in Copenhagen in August). Afterwards I was posed some really interesting questions about my work from both the professor who acted as “commentator” for the session and from other students in attendance. It was a great opportunity to reflect on my work and think about what I might do differently the next time I do a similar piece of analysis. It was also really great to see four or five other presentations from Chinese students who had used corpus-based techniques in their research, and to be able to discuss how our approaches differ.

At the end of the day there was a closing ceremony where the professors from BFSU awarded prizes for the best presentations of the conference, based on the ratings of the commentators from each panel. I was very happy to be one of nine recipients of a “First Prize for Best Presentation” award and an official BFSU jacket to match. I wore it proudly on the journey back to Lancaster.

The organisers of the Boya Forum 2013 undergraduate conference should be proud of what they are doing. As a recently graduated BA student I completely agree that the research potential of undergraduate students, particularly in arts and social science-based disciplines, should be valued and celebrated more. Events like this are a brilliant way of showing undergraduate students that their work is valued beyond the difference between a first and a 2:1. This was the first year of the conference’s short history that students from outside of China had contributed to the event, and it was great to hear that the organisers hope to invite an even wider international presence next year. Though, unfortunately, I will no longer qualify to present at next time, I look forward to hearing about more undergraduate students from Lancaster and elsewhere travelling to Beijing to present at Boya Forum 2014. It certainly was a fantastic experience, and I am extremely grateful to CASS and BFSU for jointly funding my visit.

Official launch of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science

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The official opening of the £4.1 million ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) took place on Tuesday, 23 July 2013, at the start of the seventh international Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference attended by more than 300 delegates. Delegates representing dozens of universities around the world convened with civil servants to honour the past, promote the present, and celebrate the future of corpus methods in the social sciences.

Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke was among several special guests at the launch event including representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Environment Agency. Mr. Clarke said a few words to the audience of scholars and other users of research, stressing the importance of investigating language in the context of society, as well as continuing to foster and nurture interdisciplinary collaborative links in social science research.

With such a large and influential crowd gathered, we took the opportunity to showcase a variety of new and exciting research featuring corpus methods applied to the social sciences to a wide network of people. A range of researchers from Lancaster and much further afield were invited to give poster presentations highlighting their current work, which offers a variety of exciting contributions ranging from methodological advances to increased social understanding, and greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity in academia. Poster presenters included Mike Scott, Alan Partington, Ute Römer, Kevin Harvey, Elena Semino, Veronika Koller, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Alan Partington, Alison Sealey, Andrew Salway, Paul Rayson, Steve Young, Jonathan Culpeper, Paul Baker, Rachelle Vessey, Charlotte Taylor, Anna Marchi, Catherine Chorley, Costas Gabrielatos, and Robbie Love. The posters proved great fodder for stimulating conversation about the future potentials of corpus linguistics and corpus approaches to social science.

Click below to see the full gallery of photos from the evening.