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Spoken BNC2014 meets FOLK
On Thursday 3rd December I visited the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for German Language) in Mannheim. The IDS is Germany’s national, non-university institution for the research and documentation of the German language in both the present day and the past. I was thrilled to be invited there by Swantje Westpfahl, a PhD student at…
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The Spoken British National Corpus 2014 – project update
It has been little over a year since CASS and Cambridge University Press announced a collaboration to compile a successor to the spoken component of the British National Corpus, the Spoken BNC2014. This will be the largest corpus of spoken British English since the original, with the advantage of being collected in the 2010s rather…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 4: The Question Question
question: (NOUN) A sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information. Since we speak in utterances (not sentences), most forms of punctuation are omitted in this corpus of learner language; the exceptions being apostrophes, hyphens and question marks. This blog concerns question marks. (Warning: there are not many jokes!) When we started transcription, the convention seemed…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 3: Clarity
As audio transcribers we listen to sound. Of primary importance is the clarity of the sound. clarity: ABSTRACT NOUN: The quality of being clear (‘easy to perceive, understand, or interpret’), in particular: The quality of being coherent and intelligible The quality of being easy to hear; sharpness of sound The quality of purity Let’s consider…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 2: Getting Started
training: MASS VERB: The action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behaviour. So how to begin?  With experts as our guides (and thankfully no animals in sight!)… The Context:  The first week was to be dedicated to training. We began by watching a short video clip of a Trinity examination in…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 1: Our Approach
To Transcribe: VERB: to put (thoughts, speech, or data) into written or printed form origin: mid 16th century (in the sense ‘make a copy in writing’): from Latin transcribere, from trans- ‘across’ + scribere ‘write’ In September 2013 we applied for the post of Audio Transcriber in the CASS Office in the Department of Linguistics…
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.