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
Registration is now closed. If you would like to contact us about attending the summer school please email clsummerschool@contacts.bham.ac.uk
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 Lim (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.
Getting to the University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is situated in Edgbaston, just three miles from Birmingham city centre. It is well served by public transport services, including its on train station.
Venue
The conference will take place in the Murray Learning Centre - R28 on our campus map in the red zone, close to the University train station. You can find it via our online and downloadable maps of the campus.
Accessibility
Information about building accessibility for the Murray Learning Centre is available on our AccessAble guide.
If you cannot find the information you need or have other access requirements or need reasonable accommodations, please get in touch with the summer school organisers at clsummerschool@contacts.bham.ac.uk
Accommodation
Please see the Visit Birmingham website to explore accommodation options across the city. Trains from Birmingham New Street station in the city centre run regularly to our university train station, taking around 7 minutes. Taxis from the city centre to main campus would take around 15-20 minutes dependent on traffic.
The University does have a hotel on campus Edgbaston Park Hotel and Conference Centre. It is likely to be booked for our summer school dates, but if you wanted to see if there were any places available please contact reservations@edgbastonparkhotel.com or call 0121 414 8888 for best rates.
