written by Monika Bednarek
2025 was a slightly less active year for the Sydney Corpus Lab, as I was on long service leave during semester 1. Nevertheless, we continued working on various projects before and after my leave, including our national collaboration on the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), which is a project led by the University of Queensland. You can find the text analytics tools we have been developing so far here.
Blog posts
Throughout 2025, we published a series of blog posts dedicated to different themes:
- Generative AI in corpus linguistics: A synthesis
- Copyrighted data: Options and considerations for working with newspapers and other texts
- Combining corpus linguistics with other methods – demonstrating the value of collaboration
- Triangulating semantic tagging and affect analysis to investigate gender-stereotypical emotion in sports news discourse
- Triangulating transitivity analysis: A small-scale trial of the ATAP Semantic Tagger
- Constructions of weight loss in British and Australian newspapers
Events
As part of our LDaCA project collaboration, we delivered an in-person workshop titled Explore, Analyse, Discover: Harness LDaCa Tools for Text Analysis presented by Dr Chao Sun and Senhui (Alex) Guo (both from the Sydney Informatics Hub) and hosted by Dr Francesco Bailo through the Computational Social Science Lab. Event information can be found here. In semester 2, we hosted a series of ‘dinner talks’, online guest lectures on a variety of topics:
- Exploring gendered representations of sexuality and ethnicity in the Australian sports media: A corpus-based analysis of Aussie Rules and Rugby League (September)
- The Yarning Corpus: Aboriginal English in Southwest Western Australia (October)
- Artificial intelligence in corpus linguistic research (November)
We’re very grateful to all who presented, including (in alphabetical order): Dr Melissa Kemble, Dr Kelvin Lee, and A/Prof Celeste Rodríguez Louro.
Other
We are pleased to announce that we’re participating in a new international project led by Dr Sergio Maruenda Bataller from the University of Valencia, with the title ‘Advancing social justice through corpus-based, multidisciplinary analysis of gender(ed) violence discourses: Research-based outputs for media, law enforcement, and socio-political institutions’. The project received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
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. See you in 2026!
