The CLiC blog showcases research and impact activities from the AHRC-funded CLiC Dickens project. We write posts summarising our research output, reporting on impact events and explaining new features of the CLiC web app.
Fe Brewer is an English teacher and Lead Mentor in Leicester. She is the co-author of Succeeding as an English Teacher (Bloomsbury 2021) and presents regularly on English subject knowledge and education. In this post, she explores how Dickens’ portrayal of children echoes contemporary changes around the concept of childhood.
In this post, students of the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) MA at the University of Birmingham blog about the CLiC Web App as a language learning resource. This post originated from a task set by Dr Viola Wiegand for ‘Corpus-Assisted Language Learning’, a TESOL module that encourages students to engage with the philosophy of data-driven learning. Many thanks to Weiqing Chu, Luyi Wang, Miaoting Wu and Xinzu Li for their fantastic contribution.
Anya Eastman is a second-year Technê PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Anya’s work explores the memorialisation of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde, with an emphasis on heritage and material culture. In addition to her doctoral research Anya is the co-director of Royal Holloway’s Centre for Victorian Studies and she has been on placement at the Charles Dickens Museum, working as a research assistant on the upcoming exhibition ‘To be Read at Dusk: Dickens, Ghosts and the Supernatural’. In this post, Anya explores Dickens’s ghosts using the CLiC corpora and discusses her findings alongside plans for the museum’s exhibition.
Maya Sfeir is a Lecturer based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her research interests focus on examining and understanding the literary-linguistic interface. In this blog post, she explores how sweat is represented in Victorian fiction by examining two CLiC sub-corpora, 19C and DNov. Her previous contribution to CLiC,‘On Kitchens, Keywords, Key Clusters, and Concordances…’, re-examined eating and … Continue reading “‘By the Sweat of their Brows’ or How Characters (Don’t) Sweat in Nineteenth-Century Fiction”
Dr Rosalind White takes you through a quick-start guide exploring some of CLiC’s features. If you would prefer video instructions these instructions are available in a Twitter thread. You can also find further guidance on the help tab of the CLiC Web App. The CLiC Web App (Mahlberg et al. 2020) was designed specifically for the analysis … Continue reading “CLiC Quick-Start Guide”
Nat Reeve is a novelist and AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their debut novel, Nettleblack, is out June 23rd 2022 with Cipher Press, with a sequel forthcoming in 2023. Nat’s PhD project is a queer reading of Elizabeth Siddal’s art and poetry, featuring unruly Books of Hours, tree-person hybrids, sapphic musicians … Continue reading “‘The Gumption I Write With’: The Chaotic Journals of (Neo)Victorian Characters”
We invite 250-word proposals for articles between 800-1,500 words that focus on particular details or overarching patterns within the CLiC corpora. Submissions can be limited to just one author or text or cover a range of nineteenth-century texts. Previous guest posts have covered a wide variety of topics relating to the nineteenth century: from Emma Curry’s … Continue reading “CLiC Call for Papers: Patterns and Particulars in Nineteenth-Century Prose”
Dr Rosalind White, (@DrRosalindWhite on Twitter) research associate at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Corpus Research and on #FindingMiddlemarch at Royal Holloway, University of London, proposes a way into George Eliot’s Middlemarch using corpus linguistics. In this blog post, I’d like to explore how corpus linguistic tools can be used to illuminate the semantic texture of George … Continue reading “‘I know no speck so troublesome as self’: Finding Middlemarch through Corpus Linguistics”
Today we have a big announcement to make. After five years as editor of the CLiC blog, Dr Viola Wiegand is handing over the reins to Dr Rosalind White. So this blog post is to say thank you, Viola, for all your brilliant work over the years. You made a massive contribution to introducing people … Continue reading “CLiC Blog News”
Following her previous post on using CLiC and BMI (Birmingham & Midland Institute) resources with A Level students, Alex Round steps into her role as a researcher of 19th century literature to discuss the themes of passion, convention and education in Dickens’s Hard Times, and reflect on the educational role of the BMI. This post … Continue reading “Using CLiC and the BMI resources: Restrictions of passion and effects of convention in Hard Times”
