Author: perezparedes

Give (social research) methods a chance

A collection of conversations on research methods in action designed to demystify how we know what we ‘know’.

The resource has been developed bySarah Lageson PhD, an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Newark, School of Criminal Justice and Kyle Green PhD, an Assistant Professor at Utica College, Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

The conversations can be reached here.

Corpora and metadata

Lou Burnard:

[…] it is no exaggeration to say that without metadata, corpus linguistics would be virtually impossible. Why? Because corpus linguistics is an empirical science, in which the investigator seeks to identify patterns of linguistic behaviour by inspection and analysis of naturally occurring samples of language. A typical corpus analysis will therefore gather together many examples of linguistic usage, each taken out of the context in which it originally occurred, like a laboratory specimen. Metadata can restore that context by supplying information about it, thus enabling us to relate the specimen to its original habitat. Furthermore, since language corpora are constructed from pre-existing pieces of language, questions of accuracy and authenticity are all but inevitable when using them: without metadata, the investigator has no way of answering such questions. Without metadata, the investigator has nothing but disconnected words of unknowable provenance or authenticity[1].

[1] URL: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/metadata.html

References: Burnard, Lou; Aston, Guy (1998). The BNC handbook: exploring the British National Corpus. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Transcription

Here you can find some useful resources to carry out your transcription project.

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Brian MacWhinney (2019) Tools for Analyzing Talk. Part 1: The CHAT Transcription Format. URL:
https://childes.talkbank.org/

Leech (2004): types of annotation

phonetic annotation e.g. adding information about how a word in a spoken corpus was pronounced.


prosodic annotation — again in a spoken corpus — adding information about prosodic features such as stress, intonation and pauses.

syntactic annotation —e.g. adding information about how a given sentence is parsed, in terms of syntactic analysis into such units such phrases and clauses

semantic annotation e.g. adding information about the semantic category of words — the noun cricket as a term for a sport and as a term for an insect belong to different semantic categories, although there is no difference in spelling or pronunciation.


pragmatic annotation e.g. adding information about the kinds of speech act (or dialogue act) that occur in a spoken dialogue — thus the utterance okay on different occasions may be an acknowledgement, a request for feedback, an acceptance, or a pragmatic marker initiating a new phase of discussion.
discourse annotation e.g. adding information about anaphoric links in a text, for example connecting the pronoun them and its antecedent the horses in: I’ll saddle the horses and bring them round. [an example from the Brown corpus]


stylistic annotation e.g. adding information about speech and thought presentation (direct speech, indirect speech, free indirect thought, etc.)
lexical annotation adding the identity of the lemma of each word form in a text — i.e. the base form of the word, such as would occur as its headword in a dictionary (e.g. lying has the lemma LIE).

Online services:

https://transcribe.wreally.com/

https://otranscribe.com/

BRAT: http://brat.nlplab.org/introduction.html

Backbone Transcriptor. URL

Gate: https://gate.ac.uk/teaching.html

Folia: https://proycon.github.io/folia/

Metadata for corpus work: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/metadata.html

Annotation on Sketch Engine: https://www.sketchengine.eu/guide/annotating-corpus-text/

TEI by example website: https://teibyexample.org/modules/TBED02v00.htm