On Thursday, October 30th, mpark held a visualizing corpora workshop. The workshop was led by 2 mpark fellows: Xianzhong Meng, a second-year English PhD student and second-year mpark fellow. and T Cruz, a first-year English PhD student and first-year mpark fellow.
Xianzhong and T worked together to analyze a corpus of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish lyrics. A corpus is a collection of texts, and in this case, the mpark fellows used the entire discography of these three artists to discuss activist language and lexical diversity in music. Their workshop was split into three sections, and audience members were given the space to ask questions about the process.
The first section was an overview of how to use the software used to analyze the corpus. Lancsbox, a tool made by Lancaster University, is designed for both advanced corpus linguists and beginners to analyze and visualize large quantities of language data. The second section was a presentation by T that reviewed activist language in song lyrics. T’s presentation allowed us to consider how music can be a site for rebellion for the artist but also a safe space for the audience. The third section was a presentation by Xianzhong that reviewed the lexical diversity present in each artist’s music. Xianzhong taught us that lexical diversity is used to understand how vocabulary variety works. Overall, the visualizing corpora workshop demonstrated how we can use corpus tools like LancsBox to quantify language features.
