Corpus Linguistics

Corpus linguistics is an approach to understanding large amounts of data. Corpora are large collections of language data in a computer readable format. These can be written or transcribed spoken or signed languages. Corpus linguistics has revolutionised linguistic research, but is also an extremely helpful tool for understanding patterns in text data from literature, history, cultural and regional studies. This course is hands-on and will lead students through building corpora, annotation, text-mining, quantitative analysis and visualisation techniques using text data from English, various languages of Asia, the Pacific and beyond. This course will provide the theoretical foundation to understand how corpora can answer research questions, as well as guided practice with computational skills. By the end of this course, students will have achieved basic computational proficiency to perform corpus-based analyses on their own data for their own research. No prior programming experience is required, simply a willingness to learn.