Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2025
- Location
- Murray Learning Centre
- Dates
- Monday 7 July (09:00) - Friday 11 July 2025 (17:00)
The University of Birmingham Corpus Linguistics Summer School is open to undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students, as well as researchers who want to improve their skills to apply corpus methods in their own research.
For the first time since 2019, the 9th Corpus Linguistics Summer School will be held in person on the University of Birmingham Edgbaston campus. It will consist of synchronous and asynchronous elements. The synchronous sessions will take place from 7 to 11 July 2025. Prior to the synchronous part, participants will be expected to complete asynchronous online activities consisting of self-study video lectures and hands-on materials.
Our summer school aims to equip participants with critical expertise in both the theory and practice of corpus-supported linguistic research. Building on the strengths of our Centre for Corpus Research (CCR) and our guest speakers, we offer participants a learning experience that benefits their own specific research needs and enriches their experience as researchers more widely. There will also be an opportunity for participants to present their own work and receive feedback from our expert team. Given the specialised nature of the programme, a basic understanding of corpus linguistics is highly recommended.
Registration
Please register by clicking the button at the top right of this webpage. Registration will close on 31 May 2025, or when the maximum number of participants we can accommodate in our programme of activities is reached, whichever comes first. Since the summer school will be held in person, capacity is more limited than in recent years. We therefore recommend registering soon if you are interested.
Programme
The complete programme of the summer school will be available nearer the time.
Over the course of the five days, participants will be actively involved in two kinds of sessions:
- Hands-on sessions which will put the emphasis on the learning of practical skills for the purpose of extracting and analysing corpus data of various kinds, and the application of this knowledge to specific research projects;
- Sessions in which participants will learn about current corpus research from our team.
Synchronous sessions will be recorded and made available to the participants after each session.
Topics typically covered in the programme include (this is a non-exhaustive list and subject to change):
- Analysing healthcare data using corpus linguistics
- Analysing learner language
- Analysing text with Python and SpaCy
- Corpus triangulation
- Fake news
- Introduction to R and tidyverse
- Introduction to Sketch Engine
- Readability of environmental texts
- Sign language corpora
- Social media corpus design
- Topic models
- UAM CorpusTool
- Understanding child language and literacy development
The programmes of previous years are available for your reference:
Sinclair Lecture
As every year, the annual Sinclair Lecture will take place during the Summer School. The details will be announced closer to the date.
Guest speakers at the Summer School
Joyce Kim (Aston University) Our local team of corpus linguists includes Alex Christiansen, Matteo Fuoli, Jason Grafmiller, Jack Grieve, Nicholas Groom, Yaling Hsiao, Sofia Malamatidou, Akira Murakami, Michael Oakes, Adam Schembri, Paul Thompson, Katharine Weetman, and Bodo Winter.
Corpus Linguistics 2025
The week before the summer school, the 13th international Corpus Linguistics conference (CL2025) will take place in Birmingham. If you are coming to Birmingham for the summer school, we encourage you to consider attending CL2025 as well!
We are looking forward to seeing you at the Summer School.
Please do check this webpage for updates.
