Notes from our first event

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Earlier this month (18-19 March 2019), the Sydney Corpus Lab hosted its first event – a series of talks which highlighted some of the great work going on in corpus linguistics in Australia and overseas. The program included speakers from Lancaster University (UK), Waseda University (Japan), the University of Melbourne, and the University of Sydney, presented over two days.

Day 1 had a series of talks by members of the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS) from Lancaster University.

Some of the Day 1 speakers. Left to right: Paul Baker, Tony McEnery, Laurence Anthony, Gavin Brookes.

Talks began with Elena Semino, who presented work she has done with Alice Deignan (University of Leeds) on metaphors and narratives of climate change, comparing the language used in academic articles on climate science, educational materials in secondary schools, and interviews with students about climate change. Tony McEnery presented the second talk, on work that he and Helen Baker have done looking at discourses of venereal disease in seventeenth-century England. (In keeping with Tony’s love of Doctor Who, this talk had us all travelling through time!) This was followed by Paul Baker’s talk on gender, sexuality and language in lonely hearts columns comparing results from three studies, including Australian data. After lunch, Gavin Brookes presented research on obesity in the news, contrasting UK tabloids and broadsheets.

Day 1 ended with the official launch of the Sydney Corpus Lab by Tony McEnery (Lancaster, UK) and Monika Bednarek (Lab Director). They each spoke about the importance of the lab for fostering community, and for its ability to bring together people who want to make use of corpus linguistic tools across a variety of different research contexts.

A packed room, some sessions had standing room only

Day 2 featured Australian researchers from Melbourne and Sydney and began with a talk by Jens Zinn, looking at the term ‘at risk’ in a corpus of UK newspaper articles published from 1785-2009. Then Nicole Mockler presented her work on discourses of ‘teacher quality’ and ‘teaching quality’ in Australian news media. This was followed by Alex García’s talk on the Colombian conflict between Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, specifically how victims of the conflict are represented in a corpus of Colombian newspapers. The talks on Day 2 were a wonderful showcase of the wide-ranging applicability of corpus linguistics; all three speakers used newspaper corpora, but they used these to look at vastly different topics in data from three continents and two languages!

Some of the Day 2 speakers. Left to right: Alex García, Nicole Mockler

Day 2 ended with a hands-on workshop on AntConc hosted by visiting scholar Laurence Anthony of Waseda University, Japan. This was our most popular session, with a full house and several other hopeful attendees we unfortunately had to turn away! Those who did attend said it was ‘fantastic’, ‘fun’ and ‘super informative’, with Laurence staying late to answer many questions and remaining enthusiastic and energetic. It was a great end to a successful first lab event!

AntConc workshop hosted by Laurence Anthony

More photos of the event can be found here.
(Post written by Georgia Carr)