Corpus Linguistics DIS

BYU COCA The BYU COCA is one of the most comprehensive and easiest to use corpus tools in the world today. It requires a login, but is otherwise a free software. Because it’s online, it doesn’t require a computer download, making it accessible from any computer with an internet connection. Personally, this is one of my favorite corpus tools. I use it mostly to analyze newspapers in the US for race and gender portrayals. Because newspapers follow the AP style guide, it is easy to search for terms used consistently to refer to different groups of people. The AP style guide requires that race should only be included when that information is pertinent to the story. For example, when the first person of a specific race or nationality is elected to a political office, the race is included. The terms for race are standardized so that every time a story references a person of Latinx descent, the term “Hispanic” is used. That makes it easy to search for these subjects because the res...

Google N-gram viewer This software is freely available through google, but its scope is very limited. It uses Google Books, which has books dating back centuries that are digitized and can be searched for specific terms. Because of this, it was possible to search through every book on Google Books for a search term and see when and how it was being used over time. This is a useful tool for linguists, but also for English scholars in a broader sense, because it shows the use of language over time. A linguist might use it to study language changes over time, but a researcher in literature might use it to compare how a term was being used in one text to how common the term is at that time, or how it is being used in other works of the same period. Searching and N-gram graphs. My first search on the N-gram viewer was for the word “teenagers” because I knew from my undergrad capstone that the concept is a fairly new one. As expected, the N-gram graph shows that the word does n...

Voyant Tools: I stumbled upon Voyant Tools in a class on Digital Rhetoric. As an example of technology assisting analysis, we were tasked with uploading an entire book from Project Gutenberg and having the software analyze it. The word clouds generated from one my favorite texts surprised me and caused me to start using the software whenever I’m stuck on what to analyze in a text. For fun, I just uploaded the entirety of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw into Voyant. I haven’t read this text, but it’s on my to do list the moment I have spare time for reading. The interface for Voyant appears below with this text being analyzed The tools I’m most familiar with are the word cloud, bubbliness and correlations, which is basically a different kind of collocation analysis. Word cloud: The world cloud is exactly like the one that Facebook generates for users. It shows the most commonly used words as the largest, following in size with less commonly used words. This vis...