Symposium: Reading Concordances in the 21st Century

RC21 Project Symposium: 19-21 March 2025

Join us for the RC21 Project Symposium, where invited speakers and project team members will present their work on methodology and applications of concordance analysis:

Empirical studies across diverse fields, including language learning, syntax, and discourse analysis.
Methodological discussions on systematic approaches to concordance reading and their implications for research.
Technical innovations, showcasing new algorithms and functions to make concordance analysis more flexible and effective.

For those new to concordance analysis, we are also holding a hands-on Training Day on 19 March.

Registration for all events is free, but spaces are limited. Kindly register in advance to secure your place.
Please note: Registration Deadline is 19 February 2025.

Schedule

Day 1: Thursday, March 20

09:30-10:15 Laurence Anthony, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan:
AI-Assisted Concordancing: From Search Support to Pattern Profiling

10:15-11:00 Ulrich Heid, University of Hildesheim: Query needs in text-based Digital Humanities projects

11:00-11:30: Coffee break

11:30-12:15 Viola Wiegand, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK:
Concordancing the signage of surveillant landscapes

12:15-13:00 Charlotte Taylor, University of Sussex, England:
Fear and pride: Emotion talk in UK migration debates 

13:00-14:30: Lunch break (lunch provided)

14:30-15:15: Alexander Piperski and Stephanie Evert, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany:
An introduction to FlexiConc

15:15-16:00: Susan Hunston, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom:
Construction Collocation: identifying sequences of meaning

Day 2: Friday, March 21

09:30-10:15: Yukio Tono, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan:
Readability of concordances from perspectives of language teaching and learning

10:15-11:00: Patricia Ronan, Technical University Dortmund, Germany:
Concordances versus manual investigation, exploiting their strengths and weaknesses

11:00-11:30: Lightning talks by poster presenters

11:30-14:00 Poster session and lunch

14:00-14:45: Valentin Werner, University of Bamberg, Germany:
Using concordances in pop cultural linguistics

14:45-15:30: Marc Kupietz, Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim, Germany:
Scaling Concordancing: KorAP’s Goals, Key Features, and Extensibility Strategies

15:30-16.15: Nathan Dykes and Michaela Mahlberg, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany:
Patterns of narrative fiction in English and German

Poster Session: Call for Papers

We invite contributions to the poster session on Friday, 21 March 2025. This is an opportunity for researchers, including M.A. students, to share their work on topics in corpus linguistics involving concordance reading.

Accepted posters:

Maria Ammari (Poznań): Implementing DDL in ESP Teaching and Learning
Eugenia Diegoli (Bologna): Questioning the question mark: preliminary considerations from a web corpus of Japanese
Annamária Fábián-Trost, Igor Trost (Bayreuth/ Passau): “Inclusion” and “accessibility” in Computer-Mediated-Communication for an inclusive transformation in digital societies – An approach from Human-Centered Data Science
Julian Häußler (Darmstadt): Teaching Distributional Semantics Through Concordance Analysis
Florian Keßler, Diane Donner, Shuyi Li (Erlangen): multiplyitbyxreadingconcordancesinalanguagewithoutwordorsentenceboundaries
Dongeun Lee (Erlangen): Collocation Patterns of German Prepositions vor and hinter with Body Part Nouns
Xinyao Lu (Erlangen): German Support Verb Constructions in Context Embeddings
Maria Martha Nikijuluw (Ghent): Portrayal of Dutch Apology for War Atrocities in Indonesian Mass Media
Elena Pleshakova (Bonn): Time-Series Approaches to the Classroom Discourse Research
Nicolás Raths (Mainz): Reading and annotating concordances with AI: A pilot study
Thomas Schmidt, Elena Frick (IDS Mannheim): Reading, listening to and watching concordances of audiovisual interaction corpora

Reading Concordances Training Day

Date: Wednesday, 19 March 2025
Time: 10:30 – 16:30

What is the Training Day About?

Taking place one day before our symposium, the Training Day is a hands-on event. The course introduces the fundamentals of concordance analysis using KWIC (Key Word In Context) displays, bridging qualitative and quantitative research in text analysis.

Key concepts like collocations and colligations.
Concordance tools like AntConc, CLiC, and CQPweb.
Hands-on strategies for sorting, selecting, and grouping concordance lines
Introduction to FlexiConc, a computational library designed for integration with concordancing tools.

Since the Training Day has a strong practical component, please bring a laptop!

Who is this course for?

The Training Day is ideal for students and early-career researchers in linguistics, computational linguistics, computational social science, digital humanities, computer science, and related fields. No prior knowledge of corpus linguistics is required.

Schedule

09:30: Registration and coffee
10:30-12:00: Basics of concordance analysis
12:00-13:00: Lunch break (lunch not provided)
13:00-14:30: Identifying concordance reading strategies across disciplines
14:30-15:00: Coffee
15:00-16:30: Hands-on session with FlexiConc
18:00-20:00 Reception

How to Register

To register for the RC21 Project Symposium, please complete the form below. You will receive a confirmation email indicating whether you are registered or placed on the waiting list.

Important Notice: The Training Day on March 19, 2025 has reached full capacity. If you select Training Day, you will be placed on the waiting list. However, registration for Symposium Day 1 (March 20) and Symposium Day 2 (March 21) remains open.

Registration Deadline: 19 February 2025.

Location:

Kollegienhaus, Universitätsstraße 15, 91054 Erlangen

Contact for Assistance:

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at dhss-team@fau.de. Emails should include “RC21 symposium” in the subject line.