The summer school in Corpus linguistics for analysis of language, discourse and society is aimed at students and researchers from different disciplines (e.g. linguistics, sociology, political science, social anthropology, education, economics, gender studies, history etc) who are interested in analysing language data using quantitative (corpus) methods. Participants in this summer school are not expected to have any background in (corpus) linguistics, but basic computational skills are assumed. Across different fields of humanities and social science, there is a growing need for advanced digital-methods training. This methodological need can be answered with corpus linguistic tools and techniques, which were developed for linguistically-informed analysis of large amounts of text. These methods will be introduced in the summer school and illustrated with applications to different areas of linguistic and social analysis.
The programme consists of a series of intensive sessions, involving lectures and practical sessions in which participants are trained in the use of corpus tools. The summer school has two main aims: a. to develop practical skills with using corpus techniques and software and b. to demonstrate how these methods can be applied to different linguistic areas and research questions.
The topics include, for example:
- Building and analysing own corpora
- Collocation analysis and visualisation
- Corpus-based discourse analysis
- Corpus-based approaches to health communication
- Corpus analysis in forensic linguistics
- Studying social history with corpora
- Studying Shakespeare and his contemporaries with corpora
- Analysing online communication
- Statistics for corpus linguistics
- Analysing the British National Corpus 2014
The sessions will be taught by the following speakers: Prof Paul Baker, Dr Raffaella Bottini, Prof Vaclav Brezina, Dr Luke Collins, Prof Jonathan Culpeper, Dr Dana Gablasova, Dr Claire Hardaker, Prof Tony McEnery, Prof Paul Rayson, and Prof Elena Semino. (Please note that there may be small changes to the programme of the summer school).
This summer school takes place under the aegis of The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which is the recipient of The Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. CASS is investigating the use of language related to important social topics such as healthcare, climate change, poverty, hate crime, education and language learning. The summer school incorporates the affiliated AHRC Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project.