written by Monika Bednarek
2024 was yet another busy year for the Sydney Corpus Lab, as we continued working on various projects, including our collaboration on the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA – ldaca.edu.au). You can find the text analytics resources that we have been developing for this project (together with the Sydney Informatics Hub) here.
Blog posts
Throughout 2024, we published a series of blog posts on teaching, researching and doing corpus linguistics:
- Accountability in corpus linguistics: A proposed framework and new tools for analysis
- Reflections of teaching a course on “Corpus Linguistics and Text Analysis” in a postgraduate Applied Linguistics program at the University of Queensland
- Using corpus linguistics to analyse intra-textual patterns
- New features available in the ATAP Quotation Tool
- Using constructed week sampling to compile a newspaper corpus
Events
In semester 1, we hosted an internal in-person research seminar series on corpus linguistics and text analytics for PhD students (focusing on peer feedback for work-in-progress). These talks included topics as diverse as sports media discourse, inclusive language, Australian law discourses, and media representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People(s). A full list of topics and presenters is available here.
In semester 2, we were lucky to have an in-person workshop on Hansard and other parliamentary proceedings presented by Dr Sam Hames and Dr Simon Musgrave (both from the Language Data Commons of Australia) and hosted by Dr Olga Boichak through the Computational Social Science Lab.
Workshops and conference participation
Throughout the year, lab members and affiliates presented corpus linguistic research at various national and international conferences, including at the Australian Linguistic Society annual conference, Applied Linguistics ALAA/ALANZ/ALTAANZ Conference, 2024 Forum on Englishes in Australia, 16th American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference, the Sociolinguistics Symposium 2025, and the 74th Annual International Communication Association Conference.
Publications
Lab members and affiliates submitted or published multiple outputs this year. Rather than providing a full list here, we just want to mention the most recent (open access) discussion paper in Discourse Studies on topic modelling in corpus-based discourse analysis, which is accompanied by expert commentaries, including by lab affiliate Dr Martin Schweinberger and our 2023 lab visitor Prof Maite Taboada.
As usual, 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 hope you enjoy a great holiday season filled with relaxation, happiness, and quality time. See you next year!
