What a year it’s been! We hope all corpus lab members and affiliates have managed to stay safe, and hope for better times in the future.
Covid-19 has obviously impacted on the Sydney Corpus Lab activities this year – sadly, we had to indefinitely postpone our Corpus Linguistics Down Under workshop and symposium, and none of our 2020 international visitors were able to come to Sydney because of the travel restrictions. We are not sure yet whether we will be able to hold the event in 2021, but will of course announce any developments. Fortunately, we were still able to host visiting PhD scholar Guichao Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, who was in Sydney from October 2019 to October 2020. His visit was enabled through the competitive China Scholarship Council Research Programs Visiting Scholarship.
In addition, lab members and affiliates were actively involved in numerous corpus linguistics activities in Australia in 2020. Some highlights (apologies if we missed any!) include:
- A new official partnership with the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at the University of Lancaster
- A new informal collaboration between the Sydney Corpus Lab and the University of Queensland’s Language Technology and Data Analysis Laboratory (LADAL)
- A special issue of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics dedicated to corpus linguistics co-edited by lab members/affiliates Alex García, Peter Crosthwaite, and Monika Bednarek
- Lab affiliate Michael Haugh was successful in securing two large Australian Research Data Commons grants dedicated to language corpora and text analytics, which also involve several other lab members/affiliates as collaborators or partners (breaking news!)
If you missed any of our (short!) blog posts in our regular series about corpus linguistic projects, here’s a selection for you to catch up on:
- Not as good as the men: Using corpus linguistics to study media representations of female Australian Football League (AFL) players
- ‘Crimes of passion’? Using corpus-based critical discourse analysis to critique media reporting on violence against women
- Corpus linguistics for Journalism and Communications Research
- Comparing frequent word combinations in Shakespeare and television drama
- Is award-winning ‘quality’ television lexically different to ‘mainstream’ television?
Do get in touch with us (info@sydneycorpuslab.com) if you are a lab member/affiliate and would like to write a post about your (published or unpublished) research. Contributions on all corpus linguistics topics are very welcome!
Thanks to everyone for contributing and supporting the lab, and we are looking forward to 2021! Please do let interested people, including students, know about our mailing list.
