When commencing my master’s dissertation, I knew I wanted to investigate media representations of female AFL players. I was curious to know how journalists portrayed the new women’s league, and how their messages were being conveyed in their reporting. I had a notion of analysing for appraisal, but I also wanted to avoid ‘cherry-picking’ examples…

It was after attending an International Women’s Day event in 2019, where I heard journalist and feminist Jane Gilmore speak about her project ‘FixedIt’ – an initiative that corrects victim-blaming headlines in news articles on violence against women (VAW) –  that I knew I wanted to focus my dissertation on how the Australian media reports…

We’re excited to announce that the University of Sydney, Australia and the University of Lancaster, UK have signed an MOU agreement to work on collaborative research in corpus linguistics. This new partnership builds on existing connections between the newly established Sydney Corpus Lab and the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), which was…

Welcome to the 2019 review of the Sydney Corpus Lab! It’s certainly been a very eventful year – in mid-March we officially launched the lab, with the help of international visiting scholars Laurence Anthony, Elena Semino, Tony McEnery, Paul Baker, and Gavin Brookes. The launch event involved a 2-day showcase/workshop in corpus linguistics (‘Discover the…

The Sydney Corpus Lab recently presented a timeline that attempts to trace the development of large computer corpora of modern Australian English. This blog post provides further details and includes links for accessing the corpora. The first sample corpus of Australian English, the Australian Corpus of English (ACE), was compiled by Pam Peters, Peter Collins,…

How are we faring in the development of Australian corpora? It is fair to say that there is scope for improving our grounding in empirical data both in the study of Australia’s Indigenous languages, as well as in studies of Australian English.  For researchers in Indigenous languages, the ARC Centre for the Dynamics of Language…

Corpus analysis tools such as Antconc or WordSmith Tools have revolutionized the way we view and study language. By exploring frequency lists, concordances, collocations and keywords we can learn a great deal about the way language patterns across texts, registers and genres. There are, however, linguistic phenomena that do not lend themselves very easily to…

“Corpus Linguists are the only ones that count”. The pun, included in the lecture slides of a Corpus Linguistics course for PhD students, resonated with me. Although not to be taken literally, it does highlight the need for quantitative evidence in discourse studies, especially those aiming to uncover ideologies underlying dominant forms of (mis) representation….

A short private online course for all Corpus linguistics offers the opportunity to draw informed, objective, data-driven conclusions about the type and frequency of linguistic features that occur together, occur often and occur in specific contexts – information particularly important for the purposes of teaching and learning. In particular the use of corpora for ‘data-driven…

When I first started thinking about doing Honours in corpus linguistics, I knew I wanted to look broadly at sex, sexuality and/or gender. When I approached Monika Bednarek to be my supervisor I didn’t have any experience with corpus linguistics, but it came to be the perfect method for my project. My data were the…