Hello! So I ended up in China over the weekend at Beijing Foreign Studies University to present at the 3^rd annual Boya Forum 2013 undergradute conference. And what a weekend it was. Surreal is one of the best words to describe it, mainly because I was somewhere so far away for such a short amount of time (only 3 days). Luckily, I still had a little bit of time to explore, so I have split this blog into two sections: the academic experience and the confused tourist experience.

The academic experience

I was one of two students from Lancaster sent there to present at the event, which was hosted by BFSU’s School of English and International Studies. It aimed to celebrate the undergraduate research abilities of students in several disciplines from the arts and social sciences. The participants represented a total of 27 universities, and I was from one of only three universities from outside of China. The conference was an intense day of talks and discussions (70 presentations in total!) that ran from the early morning right through into the evening, and my talk was right at the end of the day so I knew I would have a job of trying to keep my audience’s attention. I’d like to think I managed to do it.

I never imagined I’d end up presenting my work so soon – let alone in China!

After my talk (slides available here) I was posed some really interesting questions about my work from both the professor who acted as “commentator” for the session and from other students in attendance. It was also really great to see four or five other presentations from Chinese students who had used corpus-based techniques in their research, and to be able to discuss how our approaches differ. It really seemed that there was a genuine interest in the application of corpus-based methods in the study of all manner of language data – I’m confident I was able to fly the flag for the field and demonstrate that it can be very useful.

At the end of the day there was a closing ceremony where the professors from BFSU awarded prizes for the best presentations of the conference. I was very happy to win a “First Prize for Best Presentation” award and an official BFSU jacket to match. I wore it proudly on the long journey back to Lancaster! Those of us who had travelled from abroad to make it there were also treated to a post-conference banquet in the BFSU Hotel. I wasn’t aware of the Chinese convention that if you leave an empty plate it means you are still hungry rather than full – so as a result more and more food kept appearing even after we started to look physically unwell for eating so much. It was all delicious though.

The winners of the “First Prize for Best Presentation” awards

I have nothing but praise for the organisers of the conference – it really was a brilliant day and I feel so lucky to have been part of it. It certainly was a fantastic experience, and I am extremely grateful to CASS and BFSU for jointly funding my visit. I only wish I still counted as an “undergrad” next year to be able to go again!

The confused tourist experience

With the conference being held all within one day on the Saturday, I had time on Friday and Sunday to do a little bit of tourism. I have no idea when or if I will ever go back to Beijing so I wanted to make sure I saw the big sights while I was there. Unlike previous travel experiences where I have been with someone who speaks both English and the language our destination, I was very much alone as an English speaker in a predominantly monolingual, Mandarin city. What this meant was that travel by anything other than the subway (which translates Mandarin into Pinyin, the Roman alphabet equivalent), was a fairly interesting experience for someone who hadn’t learnt a word of Mandarin before his trip!

On Friday, after landing in Beijing very early in the morning, I had the whole day to myself before George, the other Lancaster student, arrived in the evening. After sleeping off a bit of jet-lag I headed to the Forbidden City, right in the heart of central Beijing. This is a massive, massive palace that housed emperors for hundreds of years, and for the last 80 years or so it’s been opened up as a museum. I was told that it’s one of the biggest tourist attractions in Beijing and it was pretty easy to get to by subway from the BFSU Hotel. So far so good!

I could see why it’s so popular as soon as I arrived. It really is an incredible place and its size certainly deserves the title of “city” – it’s huge! Unfortunately I timed my arrival badly, and once I had entered the main grounds (pictured below) I was told by a friendly looking tour guide that the main museum had actually just closed and that I couldn’t get in! Despite my disappointment I told him simply that I’d take a few photos of the outside and head somewhere else.

I hadn’t known that if I had simply turned around and crossed the road I would have also seen the incredible Tiananmen Square. Beijing – 1, confused tourist – 0.

The tour guide, though, had different ideas. He offered to take me on a one-to-one personal walking tour around the perimeter of the Forbidden City and up to Jingshan Park, said to offer great panoramic views of the Palace Museum and beyond. Usually I’d be very wary of “tour guides” who offer to take you away somewhere (and particularly because I was completely on my own!) but for some reason, perhaps my utter disorientation from the journey and being somewhere so different to Lancaster, I found myself quite happily agreeing. Luckily “Brian” was kosher and indeed he took my all the way up this hill for some spectacular views of the city. We even did a traditional tea-tasting ceremony (picture below) and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of the whole situation, so out of context from sitting in the CASS office a day earlier.

Traditional tea-tasting ceremony at Jingshan Park…a little on the expensive side but the tea really was great.

Of course, being in a traditional tea shop in the middle of China’s capital, I felt I would have been doing a terrible injustice if I walked away empty handed. So I ended up picking up not one but three different kinds of tea. Probably enough to last months, if not years! Once I made it back to BFSU and met up with George we set up a make-shift brewing system in the hotel room and somehow managed to recreate some of the tastes I had experienced at the ceremony with Brian. A nice way to relax before our busy day at the conference on Saturday!

On Sunday, after a night out with a few of the American students who had also presented at the conference, a girl called Zayba and I decided we needed to tackle the Great Wall on our last day in Beijing. Everyone else had already left at this point so we were the last two left, and I would have felt cheated had I gone all the way to China and not “walked the wall” while I was there! The nearest tourist spot by the wall, Badaling, is about 50 miles or so north of the city, so we set off to the northernmost subway station with the plan of getting a taxi the rest of the journey north from there. Simple enough, or so it seemed. However our taxi driver had different plans, and dumped us in an empty car park by a very quiet portion of the wall on the way to Badaling, seemingly because he simply didn’t want to drive us any further! We enjoyed the silver lining of our abandonment by being able to walk on the wall with no other tourists anywhere in sight, but in the back of our minds we were wondering how on earth we would be able to get another taxi from here at the end…it was very deserted!

The Great Wall…all to myself. Mwahahahaha.

Luckily, once we climbed down we managed to find another taxi driver who took us to our intended destination: Badaling (only after trying to do the same as the previous driver and dump us somewhere far from where we actually wanted to go. This time I persisted and simply refused to get out of the car!). From here we took a cable car up to the top and were met with the most spectacular views of the Great Wall seemingly on every side of the horizon. Truly amazing. It was only then that I relaxed and realised that I’d actually made it to one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It felt like we had barely been up there a few moments before we started to wonder how on earth we’d get back down (we could only buy a “one-way” cable car ticket). Soon enough we found a sign pointing us 2 kilometres down the wall in the direction of a “descending slide” – whatever on earth that meant. When we got there we realised there was some sort of toboggan constructed on a track that ran all the way back down to ground level from the wall high up above. We also realised they were about to run their last slide of the day, so to speak. So we made a dash and hopped on for one of the most surreal experiences of my life…sliding down the side of the Great Wall of China not having a clue where we would end up at the bottom.

As it turns out, where we ended up at the bottom wasn’t simply another part of the tourist centre but also a bear zoo, of all things. By this point I was sufficiently disorientated (once again) and we managed to make it back to the BFSU Hotel in the city centre within another couple of hours.

And, with that, my weekend in China, my Boya Forum 2013 experience and my time as a quintessentially confused tourist was over. I made the day-long journey back to Lancaster the next morning. For all there was a bit of stress involved in getting around I had a truly amazing time and can’t wait for another opportunity to go back. In the meantime I am only two weeks away from starting my MA in what I expect to be the busiest year of my academic career so far. And, though the Spine on Lancaster campus doesn’t quite have the same aura about it as the Great Wall, I look forward to walking it all the same as I take the next step in what has so far been an incredible journey.

Hello! As implied by the less-punny title of this blog, it appears that I’m heading to Beijing next week! Trust me – I’m about as surprised about this as you might be. Especially after I thought I had had my fill of academic trips abroad, what with Copenhagen last week. So let me explain.

About a month ago, when I returned to CASS after graduating, I had a conversation with Tony McEnery where he told me about an opportunity to present at an undergraduate conference in Beijing. The Beijing Foreign Studies University had sent an invitation for one student at from Lancaster to travel over there and present on one of a range of topics, including cultural studies, english literature, media and communication studies and, importantly, language studies. Tony suggested that I put together an abstract for a potential presentation and I jumped at the chance. Within three hours I had picked an assignment from my undergraduate degree (what else other than my corpus-based analysis of the same-sex marriage debate?) and condensed it down into a 300 word abstract.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Just as I sent my abstract to Tony I heard that another department had seemingly been going through the same hurried undergrad-presenter recruitment process and someone else had already been chosen. So that was that, and I tried to forget the idea of travelling to Beijing as quickly as it had appeared.

Imagine, then, my surprise when on Friday evening, after an entire month of forgetting everything about my brief flirt with presenting in China, an email appears entitled “Notice of Acceptance”. Notice of acceptance for what? I thought – and indeed it was confirmation that my abstract had in fact been accepted and that I was invited to present in Beijing on September 14th! As it happens Tony had sent my abstract in anyway on the off-chance that the organisers might like it anyway – and it seems they did!

So with that I’m jetting off on Thursday next week for a three night stay at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, where I will present on the Saturday at the “Boya Forum 2013” undergraduate conference. Since my audience will be mainly undergraduate or recently graduated students from a variety of non-linguistic fields I’ll be treating my talk as a bit of a “demo” of corpus-based linguistic methods. So in this sense I’ll be very proudly waving the CASS flag and doing a bit of a sales pitch for all things corpus-related.

I’m incredibly excited to head out there next week and give a talk in a completely different setting, and I’m especially pleased that the other Lancaster student presenting there is George Potter, who I already know and can’t wait to see his talk! It sounds like a setting where students on a similar academic level but from very different backgrounds will be able to come together and share ideas.

Of course, I’ll be back with a full follow-up on how I get on, but in the mean time wish me luck while I very unexpectedly go Beijing-bound!

Hello again! First of all, excuse the title of this post. It hit me on the plane and I actually chuckled to myself before realising (a) I was alone and so my spontaneous laughter looked weird, and (b) it really is a terrible pun. Nonetheless I thought I’d give it a go. Let me know what you think.

Anyway, this week Amanda and I travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark to represent CASS at a set of events organised by the RELINE Legal Linguistics Network at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Law. The aim of the two-day series of talks was to explore and promote interdisciplinary thinking between the areas of linguistics and legal research. The first day was a course where PhD students (mainly with a legal interest) could present some of their own research as well as interact with professors Anne Lise Kjaer, Wolfgang Teubert, Vijay Bhatia, Lawrence Solan and Jan Engberg, who each gave talks too. As someone from the “linguistics camp” with almost no knowledge of legal practice it was really interesting to hear about how the analysis of language can be useful in the study of legal documents. Reassuringly, some of the PhD students from a law background told me they were clueless about linguistic analysis, so I suppose that was the point of putting us all together in the same room for the day! The professors on hand each had their own niches of interest and I was particularly excited to meet Larry Solan since I realised fairly early on that I had read one of his articles during the new Forensic Linguistics module this year. He just so happens to be a really nice guy too!

This was also the day where I had a slot to present my undergrad research on the same-sex marriage debate (slides now available here). Had I known, when writing the original assignment during the Easter holidays (and while being ridiculously distracted by rehearsing for this), that I would end up presenting about it in Copenhagen later in the year I would have laughed out loud – a lot. But I was thrilled to be able to give academic presenting a go, and especially in a fairly intimate setting around a table in a meeting room in the beautiful city centre building that contains the Faculty of Law. What’s more – I think it went okay! I managed to stick to time and keep the attention of the room while rabbitting on about same-sex marriage for a few minutes.

The huge selection of Danish pastries I ate for breakfast forced me to sit during my presentation.

The second day was a seminar where the professors from the first day – as well as Amanda – got to present at more length about their work and the interdisciplinary possibilities between linguistic and legal analysis. It seems there is lots of room for further research to be done and I’d love to be involved in this in some way if I can be of use! This was followed by a very pleasant drink on the rooftop terrace above the building and a gorgeous meal at Restaurant Höst where we chatted about future steps in working with the people from Copenhagen again.

Overall it was a great trip and what I’d like to think as a successful first foray into presenting in a non-undergrad academic environment. It was certainly very encouraging to chat with so many interesting people and I’d like to thank CASS for funding my trip. I hope to go back again soon (especially if I can squeeze in another trip to the theme park too!).

Hello again! After a lovely weekend seeing shows at the Edinburgh Fringe – including the acting debut of Kat Gupta, meeting Heather Froehlich, and joining the legendary John Kirk for a hilarious post-CL2013 catch up – I thought I would give you a little update on how things are going in the CASS office after the first two weeks of my pre-MA summer research time.

Well, to put it simply, things are moving pretty quickly. If my surprise at being asked to present a poster at the CASS launch night last month wasn’t enough, then imagine my shock when an email arrived from Anne Lise Kjaer at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, inviting me to go over there to attend a PhD course on “The Application of Linguistic Methods in Legal and Socio-Legal Research”…next week! I had met Anne Lise at the launch night and knew that she was interested in what I was doing, but for that to turn into a visit so quickly is a very nice surprise. What’s more, I found out only two days ago that I’m presenting my same-sex marriage research as part of the event! So, needless to say, a lot of the last two days has been spent transforming the contents of my poster into what is supposed to be a 10 minute long presentation. That doesn’t sound much, but since it’s my first ever presentation as a “postgrad” I’ll happily go for something with a shorter time limit. The only problem is trying to fit everything I want to say in to the time – I suppose this is one of the many academic gripes I’m going to discover over the coming months…

So anyway, early Monday morning I’ll be jetting off to Denmark for a three night stay – and be sure to expect a blog with how I manage in my first ever presentation once I return.

The first slide of my presentation. If I can open with something that looks clever I might just get away with it.

The rest of my time at CASS so far has been spent working on three different research projects with Professor Paul Baker and CASS Senior Research Associates Amanda Potts and Vaclav Brezina. Back in June when I agreed to stay in Lancaster over the summer I knew that I would be working in an environment of experienced and talented corpus linguists, but I didn’t really consider how much you can learn simply by spending time with these people. The projects I’ve been working on are so far are already requiring a bunch of new skills and you could say I’ve certainly found my place on a fairly steep learning curve! The work with Paul is extending the research I had already done on the same-sex marriage debates this year and I’m really excited about getting that written up and finished off. Likewise the projects with Amanda and Vaclav are teaching me a lot about recording everything I do and not ignoring the details. So it’s safe to say I’m learning a lot already – and all before I’ve even started the MA!

Speaking of the which, I found out last week that, on top of the modules I’ll be taking within the Department of Linguistics and English Language next year, I’ll also be auditing a statistical analysis course in the Department of Psychology. So it seems I’ll be brushing up on my A-level maths big-style over the next academic year! I’m told that I’ll be the first ever linguistics student to take this course so I’m very much the CASS guinea pig on this one – let’s hope it doesn’t fry my brain too much!

Looking ahead to after the MA, I also officially accepted my PhD offer this week, starting in October 2014 and hopefully wrapping up within three years by late 2017. Once I’m finished I’ll be nearly 26. Lorks. All I’m hoping is that much sooner than that I will stop being so surprised by everything that’s happening to me and believe that my ongoing transition from undergrad to postgrad is very much real and very much a wonderful thing.

Hello again! Since sitting my last undergraduate exam at the end of May (and moving into the CASS centre only 3 days later) I’ve been dealing with a transition from the UG life I had once known to a new, postgraduate lifestyle. Something that certainly sped up this acclimatisation was the seventh international Corpus Linguistics conference (CL2013), which I attended last week as a student volunteer.

This was my first ever academic conference and, as you might expect, I approached the week with a lot of uncertainty in my mind. In terms of how the week would pan out I really had no idea what to expect and, among other things, I was a little nervous about meeting the faces behind some of the famous names I had read about in the corpus linguistics world. I was particularly excited about meeting a few people because I had read through most of the abstracts weeks in advance of the conference (most of my “CASS-time” in June was spent editing together the Word documents into a mahoosive, 370 page long abstract book…).

As a volunteer I spent most of my week wearing a beautifully designed bright blue t-shirt and a matching, equally beautiful bright green conference bag. Aside from setting international fashion trends, I got to sit in on most of the talks that tickled my fancy while helping out with any technical issues etc. All speakers (other than the daily plenaries) were given a 20 minute slot and then 10 minutes afterwards to answer any audience questions. It was fascinating to witness first hand the breadth and depth of research that is currently being advanced using corpus-based methods, as well as the really informative and productive discussions that followed each talk. I really got the sense that, despite everyone’s individual research interests, this was very much a community in which we’re all fighting the same metaphorical battle. And as the week went on I really started to get (admittedly geekily) excited about joining such a community of researchers.

As well as furthering my interest in the subject and witnessing how seriously it can be taken (there was a fairly animated discussion about p-values that I’ll not soon forget…) there were also some moments that I didn’t expect to enjoy as a conference blueshirt (yes, it became a noun). Interrupting Michael Hoey’s plenary talk to hand-deliver him my own bottle of water (after which he jokingly complained that it wasn’t beer); having a nice one-to-one with Guy Cook while escorting him back to the hotel; being in the same room as John Kirk whenever he started talking, and taking advantage of the free wine at the Gala dinner with David Wright were all highlights.

But, for me, the real highlight of the whole conference was the official CASS launch night.  I remember back in April a rushed conversation outside on campus with Amanda Potts (conference organiser), where she asked me if I wanted to present a poster at the CASS launch night. A poster of what? was my first thought (aside from the shock of being asked with a faceful of Greggs’ sausage roll…), since at the time I hadn’t even finished my degree and couldn’t think of anything I’d be confident enough in to unleash on anyone – let alone a room full of experienced corpus linguists and important people from the Home Office and the like. But of course I said yes and finished off my sausage roll wondering what I’d let myself in for.

When the time came to prepare something, I’d decided on an undergrad assignment that I completed for the corpus linguistics module only earlier this year. I had used corpus methods to compare the language of the MPs in favour of and against legalising the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill in a debate earlier this year. By sheer luck, the bill was indeed passed only days before the conference, so the poster that I had made to present at the launch night got a bit more attention than I expected!

Hob-nobbing with Bernard Silverman, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Home Office.

Aside from being mentioned twice in a speech by former Home Secretary Charles Clarke (which caused my face to match the colour of my shirt), my work took the interest of the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Home Office, Bernard Silverman. As you can see above, we had a good old natter about it while I clutched on to my glass of red wine, apparently looking like a sweating, pointing maniac. Despite this (and how I picked a shirt that I had forgotten was missing a button and therefore showed a bit more chest than I really deemed appropriate…) I think the main message from the night was one of encouragement. It certainly helped me settle my worries about whether or not I was really ready for this sort of thing. I think I can safely say now that I was!

All in all, CL2013 was a brilliant week that helped me in numerous ways. Aside from helping me keep my tummy full all week (the food was, like, AMAZING) it helped bridge the gap in my mind between where I am now and where I can hope to be in the not too distant future. And with the announcement that Lancaster would once again host the next Corpus Linguistics conference in 2015 (by which time I’ll be a first-year PhD student) it’s nice to feel like the only way is up.

Hello! And thank you for joining me for the first entry of my new, academic blog. If you have found this from my previous blog about my 2012 trip to Thailand then expect fewer references to scorpions, tigers and elephants and more references to corpus linguistics, corpus linguistics and, erm, corpus linguistics. The latter trio is just as exciting as the former though, I assure you…

Anyway, last week I graduated from Lancaster University with a first class BA Honours degree in Linguistics. Like much of the recent summer weather it was a beautifully hot, sunny day, and I got the chance to talk outside with many fellow County College graduands (and, afterwards, graduates!). The question that seemed to occur most frequently in many of the conversations I had was a very simple one: what next?

Graduation Day: standing outside the office in CASS where I will spend the next four years of my academic career.

I met people with a range of exciting and interesting plans. People moving to London to break into the West End; people training as teachers; people joining grad schemes; people travelling the world; people moving home for some R&R, and of course some people with no idea whatsoever.  The main message I got was that, whatever people were doing next, it was unlikely to be here in little old Lancaster.

Unlike me. The answer to my own what next?  question is exactly the opposite. I am staying here at Lancaster for (at least) another four years. When I told people this, I met gasps of either horror or congratulations or some hilarious combination of the two. Those who did seem horrified were mainly concerned about how I could possibly stay here for another four years without getting bored of the sparse-at-best nightlife or the lack of a Nando’s or Primark.

But when I told them what I was staying here to do, they soon conceded that I would be kept busy enough for the next four years of my university career to fly by without so much as a yearning for a popular chicken restaurant or an ethically questionable clothes store. I am staying here to complete a 1+3 postgraduate studentship as a Research Student at the ESRC funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). It’s a bit of a mouthful, and I quickly tired of repeating it on graduation day, so it soon became “I’m sticking around to do a bit of research for a while”. I would have then gone on to explain with much excitement all the juicy details about what I’ll be doing, but the sun made me so hot under my robes I really didn’t have the energy for it.

In short, I’ll be collecting a corpus of spoken language data and exploring all of the methodological issues that come along with this process. I expect it to be a difficult and yet (hopefully) rewarding project, and for my work to be under the CASS banner and all the interesting and important people affiliated with this centre is very cool. This is something I never envisaged myself doing, and even as late as the start of 2013 I was oblivious to the existence of CASS, let alone the opportunity to work here as a Research Student!

My original plan was still to stay in Lancaster – but only for one year. I had applied to do an MA here in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, and then probably use that to boost my employability in finding a job somewhere out there in the real world. This plan was born out of a realisation, during my degree, that I could be good at something (namely, linguistics) and also enjoy it. A huge influence in this realisation was the tuition and support of CASS Deputy Director Dr Andrew Hardie, who taught me during all three years of my degree. He was incredibly good at helping me find my footing in an academic environment that is so different to pre-university education.

Incidentally, he was also the man who first introduced me to the field of corpus linguistics during my undergraduate studies. And indeed, in February of this year, when I first heard about the opening of the centre and the opportunity to join it, Andrew was the first person who I arranged to see to discuss how to best put together an application. A month later I got the good news from CASS Director Professor Tony McEnery that I had won the studentship and that the next four years of my life would be accounted for by research in a new, ESRC funded centre.

So…what next? Well, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work here and join a long-held tradition of cutting edge research in corpus linguistics at Lancaster University. As a new member of the Lancaster linguistics family I am extremely excited to see what the future brings.