Lingthusiasm Episode 61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are very specific, but what if you’ve got, say, “everything published in English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how the use of a particular word (say, “the”) has been changing? In that case, you might want to turn to some of the text analysis tools of corpus linguistics – the area of linguistics that makes and analyzes corpora, aka collections of texts.  

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about corpus linguistics with Dr Kat Gupta, a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Roehampton in London, UK. We talk about how Kat’s interests changed along their path in linguistics, what to think about when pulling together a bunch of texts to analyze, and two of Kat’s cool research projects – one using a corpus of newspaper articles to analyze how people perceived the various groups within the suffrage movement, and one about what we can learn about consent from their 1.4 billion-word corpus of online erotica. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

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In this month’s patron bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about improving linguistics content on Wikipedia! We talk about gaps and biases that still exist for linguistics-related articles, getting started with Wikipedia edit-a-thons for linguists (#lingwiki) in 2015, how Wikipedia can fit into academia (from wiki journals to classroom editing assignments), and the part that Wikipedia played in the Lingthusiasm origin story. To access this and 55 other bonus episodes, join the Lingthusiasm patreon.

Here are links mentioned in this episode:

• Kat Gupta’s website
• Kat Gupta on Twitter
• Wikipedia entry for WordSmith Software
• Lexically
• Aimee Bailey’s work on homonormativity in queer women’s media
• Response and responsibility: Mainstream media and Lucy Meadows in a post-Leveson context 
• Representation of the British Suffrage Movement
• British National Corpus
• Corpus of Contemporary American English
• Lingthusiasm sticker pack special offer
  

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).