Through February and March of 2019, I had the great pleasure of spending a month at the University of Sydney working with Monika Bednarek, Director of the Sydney Corpus Lab, on various joint corpus projects related to Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) and the use of language in various media outlets.
This was not my first time to come to the University of Sydney, as I spent a few days visiting my long-time friend Brian Paltridge in the School of Education and Social Work back in 2012. During this recent trip, though, I was able to fully experience life at the university. I was able to spend many hours discussing different projects with Monika, meet with her colleagues, discuss thesis projects with her students, and give a seminar to members of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I was also able to stay as a guest at the beautiful St. Paul’s College, where I had the chance to talk with students from departments spanning the whole of the university as well as enjoy breathtaking views of the city skyline from the rooftop terrace.
The main purpose of my visit was to work on new features of Kaleidographic, a completely original data visualization tool for multi-variate data modeling that we have been developing and then applying to media discourse in collaboration with Helen Caple (UNSW). As a result of our work, visitors to the Kaleidographic website can now create completely customized visualizations of their data, publish their creations on their own websites, and let other researchers play back their visualizations while hiding or exposing different variables to see emerging patterns over time or across texts.
Another important purpose for the visit was to take part in the first Sydney Corpus Lab Showcase/Workshop, which was held over two days and featured guest presentations from researchers at Lancaster University, the University of Leeds, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Sydney. At the event, I ran a four-hour workshop that offered a practical guide to applying corpus methods across a broad range of arts and humanities disciplines using my own multiplatform, freeware AntConc corpus toolkit. I was happy to hear that the workshop attracted a huge amount of interest. So much so, in fact, that some people had to be turned away because the numbers had grown beyond the capacity of the room. Those that were able to attend seemed to find the workshop useful, and many stayed long past the end of the workshop to ask questions.
I would like to thank Monika for giving me the opportunity to visit Australia again. I cannot say how much I enjoyed the month. Wherever I went, people seemed to have a bright, positive attitude, and they would go out of their way to help me. I found this with all the students and staff on the beautiful campus of The University of Sydney, but also in every shop, museum, gallery, and tourist attraction that I visited. I would also like to thank Monika for all her kindness and her efforts to ensure that everything about my trip went smoothly. As a result, I was able to meet her students and colleagues at this wonderful institution, catch up with my good friend Brian Paltridge, as well as contribute to the growing success of the new Sydney Corpus Lab. Finally, I would like to thank the University of Sydney for funding this great opportunity.
Posted by Laurence Anthony, Professor of Corpus Linguistics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Japan