written by Monika Bednarek

As 2022 is drawing to an end, here’s the year in review from the Sydney Corpus Lab.

This year, we were able to start a number of new informal collaborations with corpus linguistic and sociolinguistic centres and labs in Australia and overseas, including the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Corpus Research, the University of Western Australia’s Language Lab, and Macquarie University’s Language on the Move. These collaborations strengthen our networks in sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

We also continued to work on joint projects, including with Lancaster University’s Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), as part of our collaboration on newspaper coverage of obesity. Other major projects included the lab’s participation in the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP) and the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), both collaborative projects led by the University of Queensland (by lab affiliate Prof. Michael Haugh) and supported by the Australian Research Data Commons. The lifting of border restrictions saw us delighted to host Dr Amanda Potts from Cardiff University in July – a long-arranged visit that had to be postponed due to the pandemic. During her visit (and beyond), Amanda and I collaborated with Dr Annmaree Watharow from the Faculty of Medicine and Health on media representation of disability.

Our 2022 workshops and webinars are described on the Events page and included:

• Law, language, and warfare (workshop, April)
• Tracking variation and change in Australian English through corpus analysis (workshop, May)
• Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks (workshop, July)
• Language and Individuals Affect Typological Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Corpus Approach (webinar, September)
• From the Darkness to the Light: Reproducibility, Replication and Transparency in Corpus Linguistics (webinar, October)

We’re very grateful to all who organised and/or presented at these various events, including lab affiliates A/Prof. Annabelle Lukin, Prof. Catherine Travis, Dr Danielle Barth, and Dr Martin Schweinberger.

On the resources side, we’ve crowdsourced and collated introductions to Corpus Linguistics written in many languages, and curated 12 thematic playlists on corpus linguistics and text analytics. And in case you missed any of our blog posts this year, they spanned a range of diverse topics (e.g. construction of new corpora, triangulating corpus methods, news media representation, teaching corpus linguistics, topic modelling in informal speech corpora), and can be found here.

In other news, lab members had corpus linguistic books published and presented talks at international corpus linguistics events, including ICAME 43; the 9th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) conference; the University of Birmingham’s 6th Corpus Linguistics Summer School; the 6th Corpora and Discourse International Conference; and BAAL’s Health and Science Communication Special Interest Group workshop. We also participated in the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia workshop on Computational Social Science in Australia.

My own personal highlights this year included giving the Sinclair Lecture in July, being able to do an in-person podcast conversation in the CorpusCast series, and being a visiting scholar at the Universities of Birmingham and Valencia.

Thanks to everyone for contributing and supporting the lab, and we are looking forward to next year! Please do let interested people, including students, know about our mailing list.