Introducing the Spoken BNC2014 – explore the data yourself
Workshop convenors
Workshop summary
This half-day workshop will introduce the Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017 fc) and, for the first time ever, allow participants exclusive access to the full 10 million word corpus within CQPweb (Hardie 2012) in advance of its public release later in the year.
The workshop will be structured as follows:
(1) Talk by Robbie Love (30 mins) – “Introducing the Spoken BNC2014”. This talk will describe the Spoken BNC2014 data. It will give participants the basic information required to interpret findings from the Spoken BNC2014 appropriately. It will focus on the demographic categories in which the speakers have been categorised, and draw attention to some underlying limitations of the corpus (and all spoken corpora) which should be taken into account when undertaking research.
(2) Talk by Andrew Hardie (30 mins) – “Exploring the Spoken BNC2014 with CQPweb”. This talk will describe the search functionalities of CQPweb with particular focus on the new features introduced to accommodate the Spoken BNC2014. In combination with the previous talk, it will prepare participants for independent exploration of the data in the practical session.
(3) Practical session (1-2 hours) – participants will each be granted temporary access to the Spoken BNC2014 in CQPweb and will be free to make searches and explore the data how they see fit. Robbie and Andrew will circulate to assist as necessary, and will note feedback which could inform last minute improvements to the corpus before its public release. Participants will be free to leave the practical session whenever they like but are welcome to stay until the end.
References
Hardie, A. (2012). CQPweb - combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis tool. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17(3). 380-409.
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V. and McEnery, T. (2017 fc). The Spoken BNC2014: designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3).