FAU Innovation Days: Digital Humanities Summer School 2025 keynote: Corpus linguistics for gender and language research: Key concepts and critical reflections

The keynote is part of the “Digital Humanities Summer School 2025: Data, gender and society”.

Title of Session: Corpus linguistics for gender and language research: Key concepts and critical reflections

In recent decades, corpus linguistic methods have gained increasing popularity (and importance) in the study of language and gender. This is, in part, because corpus approaches have enabled researchers interested in gender and language to move beyond anecdotal or intuition-based claims, and to instead ground their arguments in linguistic patterns that can be observed across large and representative corpora of authentic language use. Yet while productive, the interaction of corpus methods with language and gender research also raises a series of critical considerations. These include, for example: the challenge of operationalising gender-related concepts without reifying potentially harmful binary categories; navigating the limits of frequency- and form-based methods when investigating discursive phenomena that might be implicit or context-dependent (as expressions of gender-based bias or oppression often are); and accounting for intersectional identity performances in corpora that have not been designed for sociolinguistic research. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies, this talk will illustrate some of the ways in which corpus methods can be used within gender and language research. These examples will serve as a means of introducing key concepts and techniques in corpus linguistics, while also acting as a springboard for reflecting on the kinds of critical considerations outlined above, and more besides.

Keynote Speaker: Gavin Brookes, Lancaster University (UK)

More information and link to registration: https://www.dhss.phil.fau.de/digital-humanities-summer-school-2025-data-gender-and-society/#keynote