post by Ramneek (Athawal) Rai (2023 cohort)
I am currently working on a corpus linguistics project as part of my PhD research on the intersection of gender with entrepreneurship. This method involves using computer software to analyse large sets of language. The aim of my research project is to gain a deeper insight into the language used to describe male and female entrepreneurs. This idea was a result of a session that the CDT hosted on corpus linguistics.
As this is an unfamiliar research discipline, I decided to work on understanding how corpus linguistics studies are conducted over the summer. Hence, from Monday 15th July to Thursday 18th July 2024, I attended the University of Birmingham 8th Corpus Linguistics Summer School. Whilst the synchronous part took place during these dates, there were asynchronous activities that were self-study. Each day followed a loosely similar structure with online lectures/seminars on various topics such as Topic Models and extra reading to assist your learning of the topics. The purpose of attending this summer school was to gain an understanding of corpus linguistics methods so that when I conduct my own research, I have a familiarity with the analysis tools and choice of data collection.
The Monday started with an introduction to corpus linguistics, which was pivotal for a beginner like me. It allowed me to understand what corpus linguistics methods involve and reflect on how I would use those methods in the context of my own research. Additionally, the summer school taught about concordance lines which has also been useful to familiarise myself with as I can now engage in this qualitative method if I were to focus on how individual words or phrases are used within my research project. I learnt how to run different queries on the CQPweb software so that I can search for a specific term or related words in my research. As I will be using the word ‘entrepreneur’, this was beneficial as it taught me how to do my search if I wanted to include the terms ‘entrepreneur’ as well as ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘entrepreneurs’. There were also examples that helped me understand the content being taught.
Though I am not conducting research on sign language, I found the session interesting on sign language corpora and the challenges when conducting studies in this field. For example, there can be challenges in the consistency of the annotation. The summer school then presented an introduction to Sketch Engine which is the corpus analysis tool that I will be using for my research project on language used to describe entrepreneurs. As I gained knowledge of the different features in SketchEngine, this has helped me currently when using SketchEngine for my PhD research. A key benefit of SketchEngine is the ease of use, therefore making it easier for users like me who are new to this discipline of research.
There were sessions which were less relevant to my research. Nevertheless, it was interesting to gain an understanding of how corpus linguistics can be used in different industries and the ethical issues that may arise with this. For example, one session discussed the ethical considerations when analysing healthcare data using corpus linguistics. Often the ethical issues could be applied in other research disciplines outside medical research, such as research purpose, inclusion and anonymisation. Hence, it was useful to study this session.
Though the summer school was online, I was able to learn a core understanding of corpus linguistics due to the structure of the summer school on each day. As mentioned previously, this was a completely new discipline for me to learn, hence I often had to spend time recapping what had been taught. Additionally, I still refer to my notes that I made as it supports my understanding. As a researcher, it has increased my confidence to learn a new discipline as I am now able to conduct research using a method, I was not previously familiar with. It has also taught me to be open as to what value other disciplines could add to my overall PhD research. When I started my PhD, I did not expect to collaborate with the English department for my research. Though I did have research ideas to explore in language and entrepreneurship, it was not the area of corpus linguistics. Whereas now a large focus of my research this semester is on corpus linguistics research. Additionally, I have found myself enjoying learning a new method as it is not only interesting but has pushed me outside my comfort zone.
Forward-looking, I would be open to attending another summer school in an area that will improve my knowledge for the research projects I will work on throughout the PhD. Sometimes, there is not always a module that covers the area you need to learn, hence attending relevant summer schools allows me to enhance my knowledge for the research projects. Overall, the summer school was interesting, insightful and well-structured, providing a positive experience for me as a student attending their first summer school.