DYLAPS looking for a research assistant

Suomen Akatemian rahoittama tutkimusprojekti

Dynamics of Change in Language Practices and Social Meaning 1700–1900 (DYLAPS)

https://blogs.helsinki.fi/languagedynamics/

hakee osa-aikaista (20 h/viikko) tutkimusavustajaa ajalle 1.3.–31.8.2016. Tutkimusavustajan tehtäviin kuuluu tutkimusprojektin avustaminen mm. aineiston käsittelyssä, bibliografisten hakujen tekemisessä, julkaisujen painokuntoon saattamisessa ja seminaarijärjestelyissä. Tutkimusavustaja mm. kokoaa ja muokkaa tekstimateriaalia tietokoneluettavaan muotoon, auttaa aineistojen analyysissä, suorittaa kirjastohakuja, kopiointia ja työstettyjen tekstien oikolukua.

Tehtävä soveltuu englantilaisen filologian maisterivaiheen opiskelijalle. Erityisesti jatko-opintoja suunnittelevan opiskelijan on mahdollista tutustua tutkimusprojektin työskentelyyn ja graduvaiheessa suuntautua oppiaineessa tehtävän tutkimuksen teemoihin, aineistoihin ja menetelmiin. Tehtävässä tarvitaan normaaleja atk-taitoja, mutta eduksi on perehtyneisyys korpusmenetelmiin.

Tarjoamme tutkimuksellisesti innostavan työympäristön keskusta­kampuksella (Unioninkatu 40) ja mahdollisuuden harjaantua historiallisen kielentutkimuksen perusmetodiikkaan ja projektin tutkimusaiheisiin.

Palkka on 1100 euroa/kk.

Lisätietoja tehtävästä antaa professori Minna Palander-Collin (puh. 050 4482235; minna.palander-collin@helsinki.fi).

Vapaamuotoiset hakemukset, joista selviää hakijan opintojen vaihe, oppiarvo, gradun aihe tai suunniteltu aihe ja mahdolliset jatko-opintoaikeet sekä keskeinen aiempi työkokemus, pyydetään toimittamaan 15.2. mennessä sähköpostitse minna.palander-collin@helsinki.fi.

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HiSoN Conference organized by DYLAPS in March 2016

The Call for Papers is now on for the Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference:
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hison2016/

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DYLAPS in IPrA 2015 in Antwerp

Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin participated in the IPrA Conference in Antwerp, 26-31 July.

Minna Nevala presented a poster on “Un/solidarity and mis/evaluation: The portrayal of victims and criminals in nineteenth-century newspapers”. She dealt with the terms from a socio-pragmatic perspective, drawing from Bednarek’s (2006; Bednarek & Caple 2012) evaluation model as well as Martin & White’s (2005) appraisal theory, and categorised the data according to the notions of intensity, solidarity, and objectivity. The purpose of her work was to describe what public descriptions existed of criminals and their victims in late nineteenth-century newspapers, and how the readers’ evaluation of the crimes was influenced and even manipulated by the use of person reference.

Minna Palander-Collin participated in a panel “Towards a diachrony of relational work: Factors behind sociopragmatic change in 18th and 19th century Europe”, organized by Annick Paternoster and Marcel Bax. Her presentation dealt with “Factors behind sociopragmatic change in 19th-century British newspaper advertisements”. Her talk explored change in the form and functions of person reference in product advertisements during the 19th century on the basis of a corpus of c. 500 advertisements sampled from two London-based papers The Times and the Morning Post. The aim was to understand observed linguistic practices in relation to several immediate and more abstract contexts including the advertisers and the readership of the newspapers, the genre of advertisements, the history of newspapers, as well as broader socio-economic factors and identities. These contexts are reconstructed on the basis of
integrationist social theory (Layder 1997).

Here’s her powerpoint presentation Palander-Collin IPRA2015_pres and handout IPrA Handout.

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DYLAPS is looking for a post doc

http://www.helsinki.fi/recruitment/index.html?id=101815

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DYLAPS hakee tutkimusavustajaa

Tutkimusavustaja historiallisen kielitieteen projektiin

Nykykielten laitoksen historiallisen englannin kielen tutkimusprojekti DYLAPS (Dynamics of Change in Language Practices and Social Meaning 1700–1900) etsii osa-aikaista tutkimusavustajaa Bluestocking Corpus -kirjeaineiston työstämistä varten ajalle 1.4.-31.5.2015. Bluestocking Corpus koostuu 1700-luvun englantilaista kirjeistä, ja tutkimusavustajan pääasiallisena tehtävänä on kirjeenkirjoittajien suppeiden elämäkertatietojen eli korpuksen metadatan systemaattinen kokoaminen. Tarvittaessa tehtäviin voi kuulua myös korpusaineiston työstäminen. Työaika on 20h/viikko, ja palkka on 1074€/kk. Työn menestyksekäs hoitaminen edellyttää tiedonhakutaitoja, kiinnostusta historiaan ja kielentutkimuksen metodeihin, tarkkuutta ja huolellisuutta sekä kykyä itsenäiseen työskentelyyn. Emme edellytä vahvaa teknistä osaamista, mutta tarjoamme mahdollisuuden päästä tutustumaan korpusmenetelmiin ja XML-koodaukseen. Tehtävä sopii erityisen hyvin maisterivaiheen opiskelijalle, ja aineistoa ja korpusmenetelmiä voi käyttää gradunteossa.

Projektista löytyy tietoja osoitteesta https://blogs.helsinki.fi/languagedynamics/2011/11/10/project-background/, ja kysymyksiin vastaa Anni Sairio (anni.sairio@helsinki.fi).

Pyydämme kiinnostuneita opiskelijoita lähettämään lyhyen vapaamuotoisen hakemuksen ja ansioluettelon Anni Sairiolle (anni.sairio@helsinki.fi) maanantaihin 16.3. mennessä. Kutsumme osan hakijoista haastatteluihin jotka järjestetään 24. ja 25.3., ja päätös tehdään saman viikon aikana.

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The Bluestocking Corpus to be published in 2015! We hope!

em to west 4This year is a big year for the Bluestocking Corpus – it’s going to be published! Bluestocking Corpus consists of manuscript correspondence between Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) and her social circle, painstakingly transcribed and compiled into a digital source of research material by yours truly over a number of years. It covers about 300 letters from the 1730s to the 1790s – since it’s work in progress at the moment, I’m not sure what the actual number will be just yet. The corpus will be open access; it will be made available through VARIENG’s CoRD list and other sources.

list of letters

Letters in the Bluestocking Corpus. The dates in the spreadsheet need to be revised, as it’s currently impossible to sort this list diachronically. Would that I’d thought of this in 2004.

For the past few years, I’ve added new material, checked and revised old transcripts, restructured the contents of the corpus into decade-based files instead of the network approach which resulted in sections ranging from 1738 t0 1742 and so on, and wondered what I should do about the encoding which follows the COCOA format I learned working with the CEEC corpus back in the day (which follows the conventions of the Helsinki Corpus).

Last spring our project hired a research assistant to help me, and with Hanna the work progressed by leaps and bounds. This year, VARIENG’s tech guru Ville Marttila is going to create an xml version of the corpus once the text is ready to be encoded.

work in progress: Hanna and me valiantly revising the transcriptions

work in progress: Hanna and me valiantly revising the transcriptions.

I’m excited to have all this new material to work with, and I’m really itching to see the new statistics once the corpus is ready – there is something very satisfying in viewing word counts. I love it.

On the other hand, now that I’m almost ready to do spelling searches, I miss good old WordCruncher version 1 a great deal – it was the first corpus program I learned to use, and even though some scorn it (!), it was very useful for spelling research.

Edit. You know what: I’m going to download the new version of WordCruncher and see if it’s as handy as the 1980s version (could this be possible??). I never got the new version to work on my office computer, but there may be…reasons.

Screenshot 2015-01-08 13.01.57 (3)

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From manuscripts to corpus coding: a learning curve

On November 15, I gave a short talk at the seminar From Correspondence to Corpora at the University of Helsinki. My 10-minute talk was a confessione of sorts about some of the things I’ve learned over the years working on my own corpus project, and in the spirit of candid corpus shop talk I decided to post it here.

Before I do that, a few words about the seminar: the theme was digital processing of historical letter corpora, and invited speakers included Pia Forssell (SLS), Nina Martola (KOTUS), Marijke van der Wal (Leiden University), and Alison Wiggins (University of Glasgow). Mikko Hakala and Minna Palander-Collin gave a short presentation on normalising the spelling variation in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence with VARD2, Tanja Säily talked about POS tagging the CEEC Extension, and Samuli Kaislaniemi talked about the problematic issues of representativeness with regard to actual writing practices of the past (Tudor women, in particular), the records that survive, and the ‘edited truth’. Marijke van der Wal talked about the Letters as Loot corpus, which consists of about a thousand 17th- and 18th-century Dutch letters confiscated by British privateers during the Anglo-Dutch wars (there are tens of thousands of these letters in the National Archives of Kew). In addition to transcripts, the online corpus (click) includes images of the letters and a wealth of metadata. The transcription work was done partly through crowdsourcing. Alison Wiggins talked about the letters of Bess Hardwick and the corpus Bess of Hardwick’s Letters: The Complete Correspondence, c.1550-1608, which consists of transcripts of the letters, images, search and browse facilities and a range of other valuable information, such as Alison Wiggins’s description of the editing process. These are great resources.

But enough of these well-planned and superbly executed projects. I give you

“From manuscripts to corpus coding: a learning curve

Continue reading

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Pride and Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century

This year Chawton House Library celebrates its tenth anniversary as a research centre for women’s writing. The research institute organized a conference titled Pride and Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century in July 2013, in collaboration with the University of Southampton and the University of Kent. I’ll try to write a conference report after a couple of application deadlines have passed (unless blogging about conferences turns out to be a good way to procrastinate); here I’ve posted the paper I gave in Betty Schellenberg’s and Nicole Pohl’s panel Women and Networks, titled ‘Social network analysis of Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking circle: methodological issues and linguistic applications’. Alessa Johns, Michelle Levy, and Elizabeth Denlinger were the other panelists. They gave wonderful presentations, and I was very happy to be part of the panel. I was one of the few linguists presenting at the conference, and I came home inspired and informed and hoping for more, more. You’ll find the conference program here. (Taxidermy as a respectable way for women to make a little money! I love it.)

My paper in the Women and Networks panel

Should anyone want to cite it, simply use the information above the title.

Chawton House window seat

This is where I revised my talk (I also revised it at the breakfast table and in the hotel room).

 

 

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Why wasn’t Robert Lowth a Bluestocking? On historical network analysis and gender

I just finished reading Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (OUP, 2011). This book includes an interesting network analysis of Robert Lowth (1710–1787), the 18th-century theologian, philologist, and author of the bestselling A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), which he did not consider his main scholarly achievement, but which he is nevertheless best remembered for. Ingrid Tieken’s reconstruction of Lowth’s social network is based on his in- and out-letters (about 300 over a time span of 40 years), his memoir, his will, and two lists of presentation copies for his book Isaiah.

What took me by surprise (and what Ingrid notes as well) is that the reconstructed network is predominantly male. We know that Lowth had a wife (Mary Lowth, née Jackson) and that he supported and encouraged Hannah More to pursue her “evangelically inspired” campaigns for the abolition of slavery and “reformation of manners” (Oxford DNB), and his letters include references to the wives and daughters of his friends, but otherwise there is very little evidence of the presence of women in his life. Continue reading

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DYLAPS team in ICAME 34

Minna Nevala, Minna Palander-Collin and Anni Sairio participated in the ICAME 34 conference in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in May. Or, Anni was not physically there, but we all contributed to the poster on “LINGUISTIC CHANGE in its social contexts in eighteenth-century English”. The link to the poster is here:

http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/C18_posters.pdf

This poster reports on ongoing research with other VARIENG researchers, or a subsection of them, i.e. the C18 team. In the C18 project we map specific linguistic changes in the correlational sociolinguistic framework including Minna Nevala on you vs. thou, Anni Sairio on the progressive, and Minna Palander-Collin on its vs. of it.

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