Speaker: Ruth Byrne (Lancaster University)
Abstract: Trends towards digitisation have generated a wealth of resources for historians. However, this abundance can very swiftly become overwhelming. A search for the term ‘alien’ or ‘refugee’ in a digitised newspaper can produce hundreds of thousands of hits. The prospect of having to click on these results one at a time, opening individual articles which then require reading in detail, is enough to dishearten even the most patient and dedicated researcher. One means of approaching this historical ‘big data’ is corpus linguistics.
This paper will introduce my research, which uses the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Newspaper Collection to explore the language surrounding immigration in the Victorian press. It will do so from the perspective of a historian who has newly embraced a corpus linguistic approach. The paper will also outline some of the methodological implications which resulted from the shift between disciplines. The re-contextualisation of historical sources as digitised corpus data raises questions about how integral a source’s materiality is to our interpretation of it. However, the shift in form also opens up exciting new research directions, some of which are unimaginable via a manual reading of the texts.
Room G/8 in the Waterloo Bridge Wing (ground floor) - Waterloo Campus
This is part of the seminar series 'Corpus research in linguistics and beyond'. More information here.