Syllabus
Week 1 (18.2.)
Introduction to stylistics & corpus stylistics
Reading:
Mahlberg, M. (2015). Literary Style and Literary Texts. In D. Biber & R. Reppen (Eds), The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics, 346-361.
Biber, D. (2011). Corpus linguistics and the study of literature: Back to the future? Scientific Study of Literature 1, 15–23.
Week 2 (26.2.)
Analysing big data literary texts: a wider context
Introduction to the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Voyant
Reading:
Underwood, T., Bamman, D. & Lee, S. (2018). The Transformation of Gender in English Language Fiction. Cultural Analytics Feb. 13, 2018. DOI:10.22148/16.019.
Mandell, L. (2019). Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes? In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds), Debates in the Digital Humanities, 3-26.
Week 3 (5.3.)
Literary corpus
Working with CLiC
Reading: Mahlberg, M. (2007). Clusters, key clusters, and local textual functions in Dickens. Corpora 2 (1), 1-31.
Week 4 (12.3.)
Working with CLiC
Reading: Ruano, P. (2018). An analysis of Charles Dickens’s gender-based use of speech verbs. Gender and Language, 12(2), 192–217. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.31137
Week 5 (19.3.)
Keywords
Reading: Culpeper, J. (2009). Keyness: words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(1), 29-59.
Week 6 (26.3.)
Introduction to AntConc
Reading: O ’Halloran, K. (2007). Corpus-assisted literary evaluation. Corpora, 2(1) pp. 33–63.
Week 7 (2.4.)
Easter Break
Week 8 (9.4.)
Reading Week
Week 9 (16.4.)
Introduction to LancsBox and Kontext
Week 10 (23.4.)
Data visualisations
Gephi
Week 11 (30.4.)
Problem solving
Week 12 (7.5.) & Week 13 (14.5.)
Presentations
Annotation
Corpus linguistic approach to language uses software to search through collections of electronic texts, i.e. corpora, to identify various linguistic phenomena that make up patterns upon which generalisations are possible. Corpus stylistics applies tools and methods from corpus linguistics to stylistic research. Corpus stylistics mainly focuses on literary texts, individual or principled collections, for example, texts by one author, or texts from a specific period. It focuses both on more general patterns and meanings that are observable across corpora and more specific patterns and meanings typical in one individual text. In terms of quantitative approaches that corpus stylistics employs, it is in many ways similar to work in digital humanities that is referred to as ‘distant reading’ and also ‘cultural analytics’. These approaches emphasise the gains that we get from looking at texts from “distance”, i.e., in large quantities. For corpus stylistics, it is the relationship and balance between quantitative and qualitative that is central. Therefore, research in corpus stylistics often deals with much smaller “cleaner” data sets, so that the qualitative step in the analysis is more manageable.
In this course you will be introduced to the basic corpus linguistic techniques and methods that are used for the analysis of literary (and non-literary) texts. The aim of the course is to make students understand and appreciate functional interpretation and construction of texts. We will explore how language creates meaning, style and effect.
Students are expected to have an interest in literary texts and both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. We will be working with user-friendly software that does not require any programming skills. No prior knowledge of corpus linguistics is required.
The assessment for this module includes active participations during sessions, set reading and other course work, a contribution to the course blog, a short critical/reflective inquiry and a final presentation.
The seminars will be held online via Zoom.