Written by Helen Caple In large-scale corpus-based discourse analysis, newspaper corpora are typically constructed from databases like Factiva or Nexis using ‘seed terms’ related to the topic of interest. In addition, the articles retrieved from these databases often contain metadata information concerning different sections or genres (e.g. Analysis, Business, News). Such corpora may contain millions,…

written by Rodrigo Arellano One research practice that has puzzled me over the years is the combination of software packages and the complementary analyses they afford to develop a better understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Corpus linguists have long understood that numerical data can provide a general picture, which can be complemented by in-depth…

Written by Marco Duranti Introduction: The symbolic force of human rights The last half century has witnessed the ascendancy of human rights as a language of legal, moral, and political claim-making across much of the globe. The idiom of human rights has gained particular symbolic force (Neves 2007) and is regarded by some as ‘the…

Written by Monika Bednarek and Gavin Brookes Note: This post was simultaneously published by the Sydney Corpus Lab and by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University. It is published under a Creative Commons — Attribution Noncommercial license. If you want to republish it, please follow the relevant licensing guidelines….

written by Monika Bednarek The Sydney Corpus Lab recently published a post containing a synthesis of how large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools have been incorporated into corpus linguistic research. This blog post is intended as a companion to that much longer post. It presents the main take-aways that researchers may…

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…

Written by Kelvin Lee The advent of large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT has led to AI being used in many facets of everyday life as well as in education and research. In this blog post, I will explore how AI has been incorporated into (primarily English) corpus…

Written by Monika Bednarek Many corpus linguists analyse language in the media, especially in newspaper corpora. These corpora often contain hundreds, if not thousands, of published articles from newspapers, which are protected by copyright and typically cannot easily be shared with others outside the research team. At the same time, the sharing of data is…

Written by Monika Bednarek In recent years I have been involved in several collaborative projects that have included corpus linguistics as the methodology underpinning the research in combination with either methods or theories from other fields (or sometimes both). Most recently, I have collaborated with international researchers on two very different projects: My ongoing collaboration…

Written by Melissa Kemble I recently completed my doctoral thesis analysing the representation and evaluation of elite athletes in the Australian print media, focussing on women’s and men’s Australian Rules (AFL) and Rugby League (NRL). As part of this, I explored patterns of emotion across my newspaper corpus (the OzFooty corpus). To undertake this analysis,…