IGF news story

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) makes the news ... but probably not for what they expected?

Historical Thesaurus of English

Last month, I attended the launch of the Historical Thesaurus of English. There's more about this direct from Christian Kay on the OUP blog.

New articles for the Corpora journal

This week, I've been proof reading the new articles expected to appear in Corpora 4:2. They are:

Becoming a proficient academic writer: shifting lexical preferences in the use of the progressive

Stefanie Wulff and Ute Römer

Korean lexical bundles in conversation and academic texts

YouJin Kim

The making of a BNC customised spoken corpus for comparative purposes

Phoenix Lam

The development of a semantic annotation scheme for Chinese kinship

Yufang Qian and Scott Piao

REVIEW: Hundt, Nesselhauf and Biewer (eds, 2006) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi

Marina Santini

REVIEW: Biber (2006) University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan

How to reduce your carbon emissions by 10%

Another interesting article from the Guardian

LU News: 30th anniversary conference for ICAME

This LU news story explains what has been keeping me busy recently, including a great picture of Geoff at a previous conference.

BBC News: social networking sites monitored

Would the government ask Royal Mail to keep track of the recipient of each letter or postcard that I send? More press reports on monitoring of the internet ... thanks to Patrick for spotting this one.

Oldest English words identified?

There's been a flurry of reporting about this research at the University of Reading. Is this bad science, bad journalism or just a bad press release? Here are the links to:

1. University of Reading press release

2. Article in Nature (2007)

3. Language log coverage

4. BBC News coverage and interview on the Today programme

One thing it shows is how difficult it is to explain what we do in the corpus-based study of language. It should not be about whether I like the latest word that has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary, as I've been asked before!!