Corpus linguistics provides a set of techniques that can be used to explore, summarise and analyse corpora of digital texts. Used in conjunction with more traditional approaches it can be a powerful tool to understand historical, literary and other textual sources. This introductory workshop is designed for those interested in discovering more about corpus linguistics and the opportunities it may offer them and their research. In particular, those interested learning more about the potential of digital methods are highly encouraged to attend. No prior knowledge of linguistics or corpus linguistics is assumed. The session may be of particular interest to those in either English Literature or History, as this session considers how to approach historical texts via corpus linguistic methods, in particular.

The workshop will introduce you to some of the core principles of corpus linguistics, including: concordancing, tagging, annotation, collocation, and some more advanced wildcard searching. The 2-hour workshop will consist of a more formal presentation, group discussion and hands-on opportunities with specialist software. The hands-on part of the session includes the use of a free software built at Lancaster University (CQPweb - which accessible via a web browser). We will use CQPweb to conduct searches of a pre-built and highly annotated corpus. Please bring a laptop with you to the session to participate in the hands-on aspects of the workshop. Any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Ellen Roberts at e.roberts9@lancaster.ac.uk.

Places will be limited given the interactive nature of the session so please register here: https://lancaster-uk.libcal.com/event/3976926. Directions are available here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/about-us/maps-and-travel/