CL2017 Pre-conference workshop 7

University of Birmingham, Monday 24th July 2017, 09:30 - 12:30

#LancsBox: A new corpus tool for researchers, students and teachers

cl2017 logoWorkshop convenors

Workshop summary

In this half-day workshop, we introduce #LancsBox, a new software package for the analysis of language data and corpora, which was developed at Lancaster University. #LancsBox can be used by linguists, language teachers, translators, historians, sociologists, educators and anyone interested in quantitative language analysis. It is free to use for non-commercial purposes and works with any major operating system. The participants will be given data (corpora), interactive exercises and an early release version of #LancsBox v.3.0.0b. The exercises will focus on visualization of collocations and keywords. We will also outline the most recent debate on statistical approaches to corpus data and invite participants to engage in a critical discussion of the future of corpus linguistics.

In particular, the participants will learn:

  • Search and filter data according to different categories.
  • Compare different corpora.
  • Apply simple statistical measures.
  • Visualize collocations and keyword.
  • Export results and use them in presentations and research reports.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in innovative exploration of language using computational tools. It does not presuppose any technical or statistical knowledge.