written by Martin Luginbühl

In June 2023, I had the opportunity to work for three weeks as a Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Corpus Lab. I first met Monika Bednarek some years ago when she was a Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, which is only a stone’s throw away from my University, the University of Basel, where I hold a Chair for German Linguistics.

Like Monika, I work in the field of Media Linguistics, focusing on comparative research of news cultures. My stay at the Sydney Corpus Lab gave me the opportunity to explore many different corpus linguistic tools that are used within the lab, taking a deeper look at a corpus of German newspaper headlines. Working just next door to Monika, it was easy to discuss my work and methodological questions with her – and get help if I got stuck somewhere in a tool. In addition to a better understanding of the different tools I got to know, I also started to compile a corpus of Australian newspaper texts. This is preparatory work for a comparative project on newspaper headlines, comparing Swiss and Australian newspapers. This also gave me the opportunity to experience a more hands-on aspect of corpus linguistics: That it can take several days to compile a corpus, making a hard disk almost explode. I am looking forward to exploring the data in more detail upon my return to Switzerland.

It only remains for me to thank Monika for being such a wonderful host – I can only hope that our exchange will find a continuation someday, be it in Australia or Europe.