The UCREL Corpus Research Seminar (CRS) is a forum for all staff, visiting academics, and postgraduate research students interested in corpus-based research in any area of linguistics. CRS is run by UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language), a research centre between the Department of Linguistics and English Language and the School of Computing and Communications.
CRS meetings offer an opportunity to present work in progress and receive helpful feedback, discuss relevant research, approaches and methods, get experience in using corpus interfaces and tools, and stay up to date with corpus-based research at Lancaster University. We welcome anyone who is a newcomer to this exciting and growing area of linguistics. We welcome presentations from researchers of other departments and universities.
On this site, along with general information, you will find a list of upcoming seminars and an archive of past seminars. If you have any suggestions of things to add to the site, then please get in touch.
In 2014/2015 CRS meetings will be on Thursdays at 1pm during term time, unless otherwise indicated.
Notifications of seminars are sent to the UCREL Mailing List, sign up if you would like to receive them and other UCREL related messages. You can also follow us on Twitter, where we post updates on upcoming seminars.
If you need more information or want to give a presentation, please contact one of the CRS organisers:
[...] = add @lancs.ac.uk for email address.
This website is still under construction. The previous website has an archive of past seminars.
We acknowledge the following funding for external speakers: CASS and UCREL research centres, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Department of Linguistics and English Language and the School of Computing and Communications.
The UCREL Corpus Research Seminars this academic year (2014/15) will be on Thursdays 1pm-2pm during term time, unless otherwise indicated, please check our upcoming page for the time and location of any future presenations. If you would like to give a talk or have a suggestion for an external speaker to invite, then please get in touch.
Upcoming seminars
Next seminar
Week 18
Thursday 5th March 2015
2:00-3:00pm
Management school LT9
The Aston Corpus of West Midlands English: a variationist approach to spoken data collection and analysis
The seminar will provide an overview of the spoken corpus, The Aston Corpus of West Midlands English. One of the (unintended) outcomes of several funded projects by The Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC into discourse and sociocultural identity in the West Midlands region of the UK has resulted in the collection of a significant amount of spoken data.
This data takes the form of four distinct categories: performance data (comedy, drama sketches, poetry); interviews with performers, interviews with audience members at performances and interviews with local and national celebrities associated with the region. Although collected ethnographically and qualitatively, the amount of data is such that quantitative data analysis has been made possible to complement qualitative analysis. Data has been transcribed using the program EXMARaLDA, that allows for different layers of transcription to be annotated simultaneously - in this case, orthographically and using IPA (to which an intonation layer has yet to be added) in ways that allow consideration of form and function to occur independently of one another as well as together in context.
Full details
Week 19: 12th March 2015 (2:00-3:00pm)
Management school LT9
Harnessing Social Media Streams for Local Information Needs
More information
Week 20: 19th March 2015 (2:00-3:00pm)
Management school LT9
Critical issues in spoken corpus development: the Spoken BNC2014 transcription scheme and speaker identification
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