(written by Monika Bednarek)
2023 was a fairly busy year for the Sydney Corpus Lab, as we continued working on various projects, including our international collaboration with the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) on obesity in the news (see associated articles here and here), and our national collaboration on the ARDC-funded Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP) and Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), which are projects led by the University of Queensland. You can find a list of the text analytics tools ATAP has been developing here.
Blog posts
Throughout 2023, we published a series of blog posts featuring 12 interviews with prominent corpus linguists. These were extracts from Aston University’s CorpusCast podcast (hosted by Dr Robbie Love) with answers to questions such as:
- What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in corpus research throughout your career?
- What has surprised you the most about your work in corpus linguistics?
- What is the biggest misconception of corpus linguistics you have encountered?
- How will corpus linguistics make an impact on the world in the future?
We also published some ‘regular’ blog posts, both for the Sydney Corpus Lab website and for the ATAP and LDaCA websites:
Sydney Corpus Lab site
- Labelling people with disability in Australian newspapers
- Promoting corpus linguistics and text analytics in the Arts and Social Sciences
- Triangulating computational and corpus linguistic methods to investigate climate discourse on Twitter
ATAP site
- Introducing the Document Similarity Tool: A new tool for corpus building
- Introducing the ATAP Quotation Tool: Extracting quotes and entities from newspaper articles
- Introducing the Semantic Tagger tool: Semantic categorisation of words in English, Chinese, Italian or Spanish texts
- Introducing the Keyword Analysis tool
LDaCA site
- Interview with our ATAP/LDaCA Chief Investigators – Part 1
- Interview with our ATAP/LDaCA Chief Investigators – Part 2
Events
In semester 1, we hosted a series of talks by lab members, affiliates, and international visitors (details available here), and co-organised a workshop on “Challenges and New Directions in English Corpus Linguistics in Australia” at the 7th Meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE 7) (convened by Monika Bednarek, Peter Crosthwaite, and Martin Schweinberger). In semester 2, we co-hosted a mini-webinar series on the theme “Corpus Linguistics and Text Analytics” together with the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (Lancaster University, UK). The mini-series included three talks in October/November, and recordings were made available for all. We’re very grateful to all who presented at these various events in 2023, including (in alphabetical order): Dr Gavin Brookes, A/Prof Helen Caple, Dr Isobelle Clarke, Dr Luke Collins, Dr Peter Crosthwaite, A/Prof Annabelle Lukin, Prof Tony McEnery, and Prof Maite Taboada.
Workshops and conference participation
As part of our ATAP/LDaCA project collaboration, we developed and delivered multiple workshops presented by the Sydney Informatics Hub (both in person and online) throughout the year, including at the Policy & Internet Conference 2023 and at the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association 2023 conference. Several lab members/affiliates presented at ISLE 7 in Brisbane (June) and at the ALS annual conference in Sydney (November-December). Although we weren’t able to attend the 12th International Corpus Linguistics conference in person (July, Lancaster University), we were represented by Tara Coltman-Patel from CASS, who gave a talk on our collaborative project on obesity in Australian newspapers. Other conferences we participated in included the Forum on Englishes in Australia (La Trobe University, September) and the 15th National Conference of Comparative Studies between English and Chinese (Sichuan International Studies University, October).
Visiting scholars
Our international visitors in 2023 included Dr Gavin Brookes and Dr Luke Collins from Lancaster University, Prof Maite Taboada from Simon Fraser University, and Prof Martin Luginbühl from the University of Basel. Martin kindly wrote about his visit to the lab here.
Other
The book Language and Characterisation in Television Series. A Corpus-informed Approach to the Construction of Social Identity in the Media won the 2023 Screenwriting Research Network Best Monograph award. Further details about the book are available here.
As part of our informal collaboration with Macquarie University’s sociolinguistic research group/site Language on the Move, we contributed a post (written by Dr Annmaree Watharow with Prof Monika Bednarek and 2022 lab visitor Dr Amanda Potts) about our joint corpus linguistics research on disability representation in Australian newspapers. We were also pleased to announce a new association with the University of Valencia’s Research Group on Corpus Linguistics: Developments and Applications (CORPLING).
Apologies for any unintentional omissions and thanks to everyone for contributing to and supporting the lab! Please do let interested people, including students, know about our mailing list. We are looking forward to new adventures and endeavours in 2023!
