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 power of computer-based text analysis’). You can read a review of the event here, or browse pictures from the event here. Laurence also wrote a blog post about his longer visit (which included a research seminar and a hands-on workshop on AntConc).

In August, we were able to run another event with an international visiting scholar, Matteo Fuoli, who gave a very successful workshop introducing UAM Corpus Tool, a free software for the annotation of text corpora. If you missed the event, or would like to learn more about what you can do with this software, you can read his blog post here.

The final corpus training we ran was an introductory workshop to corpus linguistics at a pre-conference institute in Sydney. The workshop was designed by Monika Bednarek and delivered by corpus lab members Alex Garcia and Georgia Carr. It provided an overview of current tools that are available, and also covered key issues such as language encoding, file types, and tagging.

Towards the end of the year, the lab hosted two more international visitors, Piergiorgio Trevisan (University of Udine, Italy), and Guichao Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China).

We also started a series of regular blog posts by lab members and affiliates. In case you missed any of these, here’s a quick round-up:

In the first blog post (From the Zoom to the Wide-angle Lens: On one researcher’s encounters with corpus-assisted analysis) Nicole Mockler talked about how she got into corpus linguistics as an educational researcher with an interest in media representations of education.

The next post was written by none other than Sydney Corpus Lab project manager Georgia Carr, who used corpus linguistics in her Honours thesis to study whether sex education for young women has changed over time. You can read about this in her post STDs and anxiety: Using corpus linguistics to study Dolly Doctor.

We then had the pleasure of hearing from Peter Crosthwaite (University of Queensland) about his online course ‘Improving Writing Through Corpora’, which provides training in corpus consultation for data-driven learning, using SketchEngine with activities designed around the British Academic Written English corpus. More information is provided in his blog post.

Next up was Alex Garcia Marrugo, who provided a fascinating summary of the findings from her work on how newspapers portrayed the violence committed by the different illegal actors in the Colombian conflict. A previous blog post (in Spanish) went viral and was reproduced in about a dozen independent online news sites. You can read the summary Alex wrote for the Sydney Corpus Lab here. This will be especially interesting for CDA researchers.

The next two blog posts both focussed squarely on Australia – in line with the lab’s mission to promote corpus linguistics in Australia. Annabelle Lukin’s blog post provided a great overview of ‘Australian corpora: the state of affairs’. Monika Bednarek then created a dynamic timeline that showed the development of large computer corpora of modern Australian English, and wrote a companion blog post providing further details and links for accessing the corpora. While there is some overlap with Annabelle’s blog post, this offered a bit more of a historical perspective and also looked briefly at the creation of corpus linguistic units of study in Australia (with quotes from Pam Peters).

It has been a great first year; thanks to everyone for contributing and supporting the lab, and we are looking forward to another great year in 2020. One event that we know for sure is coming up is another free symposium, Corpus Linguistics Down Under on 2-3 July 2020. The call-for-papers is available here. Join our mailing list to be updated on our events.

Happy holidays!