Like many other academics, the CLiC Dickens team is currently busy preparing for a variety of events and conferences over the summer. We will both show how to use the CLiC web app and present insights that we have gained from using CLiC as a research tool ourselves. So the coming weeks will be exciting!

Corpus linguistics events

Our PI, Michaela Mahlberg, opened our personal summer conference season last week by giving a keynote speech at the Journées Internationales de la Linguistique de corpus in Grenoble. Closer to home, we will be teaching two sessions at the CCR Summer School in Corpus Linguistics next week. This will be a week full of hands-on corpus linguistic activities ranging from linguistic questions like how to do genre analysis with corpus tools to hardcore statistical methods – have a look at the programme! CLiC will feature in Michaela Mahlberg’s talk -“Concordancing in Context” and, as obvious from the title, my (Viola’s) talk “Corpus stylistics with CLiC”. If you can’t be there in person, you can follow part of the action on Twitter with the #ccrss17 hashtag.

The summer school marks the first of two weeks of intense corpus linguistic activity here at the CCR, as it will be followed by the big Corpus Linguistics 2017 conference (CL2017). The CLiC team will be represented at various points during CL2017. First, the whole team will be participating in the pre-conference workshop Styling: big and small data in Corpus Stylistics on 24 July, organised by Beatrix Busse and Anna Čermáková. This will be a full day of talks on corpus stylistics; do check out the workshop programme, which looks fantastic! The programme also contains two talks from the CLiC team on “Speech in fiction and real spoken language” and “Tracing subliminal ambience through cognitive corpus stylistics”.

Workshop #corpusstylistics at #cl2017bham is now online https://t.co/ew4Qvx0pWc !

— Anna Cermakova (@AnnCerm) July 7, 2017

At the main CL2017 conference we are giving collaborative talks. Together with Jesse Egbert, Michaela Mahlberg will present the talk “Fiction — One Register or Two? Narrative and Fictional Speech in Dickens’s Novels”. CLiC will also feature in the linguistic examples for the methodological talk “A cookbook of co-occurrence comparison techniques and how they relate to the subtleties in your research question” (Viola Wiegand, Anthony Hennessey, Christopher Tench & Michaela Mahlberg).

Follow the unfolding CL2017 action on Twitter with the hashtag #cl2017bham. (Don’t mix it up with #cl2017, which was reserved for the ⚽️ champions league, among others…).

To be followed by the 1st day of talks and a drinks reception at the @BarberInstitute in the evening (with open galleries!) #cl2017bham 2/2 pic.twitter.com/p4LXORYAxW

— CCR (@CCR_UoB) July 11, 2017

Victorian and Dickens studies events

We are very happy that apart from presenting our research at (corpus) linguistic events this summer, we will also be showing CLiC output at two events in other disciplines. In August, Peter Stockwell and Michaela Mahlberg are giving a talk at the BAVS2017 (British Association for Victorian studies) conference in Lincoln: “What is Dickensian about Dickens? A cognitive corpus stylistics of ambience”. The programme contains a wide range of innovative approaches, following the theme “Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections”. (Hence the Twitter hashtag #VictoriansUnbound in addition to #BAVS2017). Finally, coming up in the autumn, we have a talk lined up at the Dickens Day 2017 in London (14 October) where we will talk about “textual patterns of dreaming and the unconscious mind in Dickens”.

So, as you can see, there are plenty of exciting events coming up and we will be posting updates when we can. Have a great summer (and conference season) – perhaps we will cross paths somewhere!