Mathew Gillings
Assistant Professor at Vienna University of Economics and Business. Communications Officer for the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language project. Specialist in corpus-based approaches to discourse.
Location Vienna
Activity
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Mathew Gillings replied to John Evans
Good idea, glad you find it useful John.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Faith Donnelly
Glad you enjoyed the course, Faith - thanks for joining us! Now that you've got access to CQPweb, do feel free to have a look at the other corpora that are available to you. All of the same corpus-based tools can be used there too. :-)
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Yes - a large part of the course is in being able to play around with the tools themselves on CQPweb, so it is understandable that you were unable to appreciate it fully. See my comment elsewhere on how we can get you set up on the website.
The tablet issue is new to us though - the first time we are hearing of it. It's doubly surprising because they are...
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The general point being made here is that there is a widespread belief that Shakespeare is responsible for much of the English language as we know it today. Significantly more than the 400 or so words that can actually be attributed to him. Interesting that you have seen absolutely no sign of that myth yourself, or managed to otherwise avoid it! :-)
There...
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Mathew Gillings replied to k.sridhar korivi
A wonderful introduction! Welcome to the course. :-)
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Interesting point. Now that we do have standardization of the written form, do you think we now have fewer dialects than we did through the Early Modern period?
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Mathew Gillings replied to Clare Shepherd
Hi Clare. This most common issues tend to be that the wrong email address has been entered, or the registration email has been sent to 'Spam' or 'Junk'. If that still isn't the case, then send Andrew Hardie (CQPweb creator and our tech lead) an email. Tell him your username and he'll look into it. He can be contacted at: a.hardie [at] lancaster.ac.uk
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Mathew Gillings replied to Tracy W
All sounds wonderful, I've just had a look through the Wikipedia entry for Agecroft Hall! Welcome to the course! . assume you've made some of the early modern recipies yourself. What's your favourite?
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I think we can use the term 'research' liberally here, although 'goals' alone works perfectly well too!
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Interconnections between different texts (including quoting) = intertextuality! :-)
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An interesting observation, and it speaks to one issue I have when listening to German. It's a wonderful language to learn, but also perfectly possible to have all sorts of different clauses going on and on, before popping a verb on the end. :-)
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Good point - we really need to think critically about wild estimates such as these!
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The differences in metaphor, between then and now, is a really good observation to make. Some metaphors are context or culture-specific, so when that changes over time the construction no longer works and it breaks down.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Santiago Gonzalez
Thanks for taking part in the course Santiago!
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Mathew Gillings replied to Martin Sadler
Music to our ears! From the project's very beginning, we always wondered how actors might respond. The proof is in the pudding, I guess!
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Is this the first time you've encountered the keyword approach, Martin? A handy way to get a feel for a text before digging in... :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Anne Schlieper
Counting is, of course, only the "way in" to the data - a new way of exploring the plays. The whole endeavour is pointless without close-reading and interpretation.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Michael Holt
Glad to hear it! Thanks for joining, Michael.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Martin Sadler
Right? So many different aspects to consider and, ultimately, it ends up being a matter of interpretation.
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Hi Santiago. Looks like you're working with the wrong corpus, oops! The one that you're using hasn't undergone spelling standardisation by the looks of things. Try this link instead: https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/shakfinc006/
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Mathew Gillings replied to Manuel Gutierrez
Glad to hear it!
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Mathew Gillings replied to susan smith
That's a shame. Did you struggle with the method, or struggle to find any particularly new/revealing findings?
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Mathew Gillings replied to Martin Sadler
Hmm, strange. Is it the email confirmation that you're stuck at? Have you triple-checked your spam/junk folder to see whether it ended up there?
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Really interesting approach, essentially trying to recreate what would have happened at the time. Definitely exciting to be involved with something like that.
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Hello again! Do you mean that the audio volume is too low? I've tried it on several devices and seems fine to me. Have you tried playing around with the volume settings on your computer (e.g., if using a Windows computer then open the "sound mixer" and make sure everything is turned up)?
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Mathew Gillings replied to Santiago Gonzalez
Thank you indeed!
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Exactly - sadly without a time machine there's no way of knowing what folk standing on the street outside the theatre were actually saying... :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Michael Holt
A raw word count might be useful for looking at, for example, which words Shakespeare used the most frequently across all of his plays. But it really gets the most interesting when comparing with other playwrights, comparing across plays and characters, etc. For that, then some kind of normalised frequency is needed.
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Good point. And there's a similarly wide range of reasons for that variation too: constraints imposed by the printing process; the rhyme and metre; the lack of standardisation at the time, etc.
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I think one of the best ways to get to grips with both the analysis tool, and the language, is simply to "play around"! You'll stumble upon new and interesting things when you least expect it... :-)
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Thanks Vanessa - an eagle eye! I've made a note of this so that we can edit it on the next iteration.
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Completely agree - many of the themes are timeless, as relevant now as ever.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Frances Dharmalingam
No problem Frances. The glossary is there to serve as a reference guide, as and when you need it. Each concept is explained in full as we go through the course anyway. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Martin Sadler
Glad you enjoyed it Martin, see you in week 2!
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Mathew Gillings replied to Michael Holt
Welcome to the course, Mike! Sadly your early experience seems to have been all-too-common. Hope you find some food for thought here!
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Mathew Gillings replied to Derek Irving
Welcome to the course, Derek!
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Yes, by flouting the standard (socially-accepted?) way of using the pronoun, you can see how it could come across as impolite.
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Good point, especially re: punctuation. I read some work recently on how the use of full stops in e-language (text messages, WhatsApp messages, etc.) can, when used in some contexts, be interpreted as passive aggressive, particularly by younger users. Amazing how something as small as a punctuation mark can hold such loaded meaning.
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Mathew Gillings replied to susan smith
Hi Susan, welcome to the course. I hope you'll find plenty of food for thought as you work through the activities. :-)
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Hi Isabella. How interesting! So it was a modern retelling that you sawat The Globe? Perhaps goes to show how many of the themes live on to the modern day, only within new contexts.
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Hi Marie-Helene - I completely agree. I always wince when I read newspaper articles, tweets, etc., with people lamenting language by "the youth of today". Developing new words, playing with grammar, twisting word meanings... things that people dislike about modern language change, but exactly what Shakespeare is loved for. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Alan Ord
Welcome to the course, Alan!
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Mathew Gillings replied to Hridya H
Thanks Hridya - we think so too! The benefit here is that you can start with the statistics, then drill deeper into the context. The numbers tell you where to look closer. :-)
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@AmeliaHare Exactly. Looking at the collocations would help point you towards disambiguating between different meanings.
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Mathew Gillings replied to paola dell acqua
@paoladellacqua You can find Sean's staff page here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/sean-murphy
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Mathew Gillings replied to Susan Boorman
There still might be a couple of us checking-in Susan! Just leave a comment or tag us in. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Rosalia Di Nisio
Hi Rosalia - yes indeed! If you search for "corpus linguistics political speech" on Google Scholar you should come across plenty. :-) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=corpus+linguistics+political+speech&btnG=
Thanks for your kind words!
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@ChristaAngerer Great to hear how you and your son came across the project and the MOOC! Serendipitous. :-)
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Exactly! Keywords point us towards areas which may potentially be interesting, but blindly accepting a result based on statistics alone would be premature. We need to look at the linguistic context (but also the social, cultural, and historical context) in order to determine why the keyword is there. :-)
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You're in the right place Michael! You'll get a good introduction to corpus linguistics here, applied specifically to Shakespeare's texts. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Hong Gu
Welcome to the course Hong!
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Good point Isra - many people first encounter Shakespeare's works at school where we do so in such minute detail. It's often difficult to get that back!
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Some interesting points here: we will explore the importance of the metre over the first couple of "weeks"!
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...and hopefully you will further appreciate it as we learn about that subtle intricacy on the course. Welcome!
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Why do you think it's more difficult now than as an eleven year old? More awareness of the difficulty now, perhaps?
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Sounds like just the course for you Margaret! The Canadian Shakespeare Festival sounds like a lot of fun. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Dava Castillo
I guess an interest in his works never really leaves you! Enjoy the course. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Frank Farmery
Hi Frank - welcome to the course. Just give us a shout if you need help at any point!
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Mathew Gillings replied to paola dell acqua
Hi Paola - welcome to the course! One of our educators, Sean Murphy, is also joining from Spain - hope you enjoy it. :-)
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It is possible to study innuendo and double entendres in a serious manner, of course, but I get the point!
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If you google "language tree" you will get some nice diagrams showing how the world's languages are connected. :-)
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Well it is relatively easy to do that kind of analysis, but the number of keywords you get will depend on your comparison corpus and the various settings you set. If you go to this page (https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/shakfinc006/index.php?ui=keywords), select the First Folio as frequency list 1, and select perhaps "BNC Sampler" as frequency list 2. This will...
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Hi Elizabeth - which downloads? There shouldn't be anything for you to download on this step.
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Sounds like a lovely place to do some CQPweb exploration! Jealous. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Susan Boorman
@SusanBoorman Yes, good idea to print it out and have it alongside the screen, definitely makes life easier. Thank you, of course, for those very kind comments - I'm glad you've enjoyed the course! The formal facilitation does end this weekend but I, for one, will pop in to help where I can, so do comment if you need to and someone will see it! :-)
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The "Last restrictions" row that you can see when you go to create a subcorpora will change with each restricted query that you make. It is unique to your account, because it is the last query you made on your account. The one that you can see on Andrew's video is the last restricted query he made - it isn't a shared subcorpus between everyone.
Your best...
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Mathew Gillings replied to Anna Hull
On the home stretch now! :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Alyson Kelman
@AlysonKelman If “things are missed” then that suggests you have a predetermined idea of what you want the data to show, and the subsequent annoyance comes when the data doesn’t behave. For me that’s the wrong way round: it’s good to have hypotheses of course, but the data does the talking. If you already know something without using new methods, and you have...
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Yep - just click on "Query history" up the left-hand side of the page (https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/shakfinc006/) and you'll see a list.
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Hi Igor - yep you guessed it, those are instances in which you would take a look through the concordance lines and the wider narrative to see whether the difference is interesting or not. It may just be the nature of the scene, but there may also be something meaningful about the choice to use that specific word over any other.
The fact that you came across...
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What might be a better question is: do we want to be completely objective when interpreting (literary) texts? If so much of language relies on culture, context, beliefs, ideologies, etc., then that human input is necessary to fully understand what is happening - something that a computer could never do.
Corpus methods do help us to reduce bias. If I was to...
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Hi Rosalia - really good question and I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this. For me, it rather depends on the individual project: the data, the research questions, the specific methods being used, etc. A few years ago, a colleague gave the same dataset to 10 researchers and asked them each to carry out a different type of analysis on it...
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Mathew Gillings replied to Alyson Kelman
I think Igor has hit the nail on the head here. Corpus methods can help us to identify patterns and help us to understand how Shakespeare's plays would have been understood at the time by his contemporaries. We will never know what Shakespeare was "in the least concerned with" - because he isn't here to tell us - but we can look into his language usage to try...
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No need to select the FF as the source as that's a given - you can double check it by looking at the number of words in the subcorpus. :-)
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It would definitely be helpful to have consensus whilst working on a specific project, with other members of a team, etc. The point here though is that there is a real lack of consensus within the research community; a word can be defined in different ways depending on your objective. Whether that is a good or bad thing is up to you...!
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Yes, this is the whole point of corpus-based methods; there's no point analysing a single word without its context!
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Why do you think reading lines out loud help us understand language?
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Exactly - language is always part-and-parcel of its context. Meaning is constantly being made all around us and it can provide clues to help us interpret. :-)
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A major difference being, of course, that being able to understand the context of a play is very different to understanding the meaning of a word, the nuanced contexts in which it is used, etc.
I can make an educated guess about the plot of a play, just like I can make an educated guess about what my local baker says to me (in German) when I go for a loaf...
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Still plenty of time @RitaMacKinnon - just give us a shout if you need any help! :-)
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Good point - not something we consider on this course specifically, but definitely something you could explore by comparing the ESC with modern-day corpora of English (also accessible via CQPweb). Idioms rely so heavily on cultural and contextual knowledge, so it seems pretty much a given that these would change over time. Which ones, and how, is another...
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Mathew Gillings replied to Alyson Kelman
I don't think I agree with you that new methods and tools bring "annoyance to other scholars". New methods bring new insights, and if one isn't open to new insights then what does that say about the scholarship in the first place? :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Anna Hull
I agree, pretty much any method we use for the analysis of literary texts comes with a risk of bias (and in many cases, that subjectivity is not a bad thing).
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Mathew Gillings replied to Alyson Kelman
Hi Alyson - glad to hear you enjoyed the course! You retain access to CQPweb even beyond the end of the course, so feel free to use the ESC: Poems which can be accessed via the main page: https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk :-)
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Yes, just "cubs" today - a nice finding there.
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Nice find. A good next step would be to check the dispersion (to see how many plays each word appears in, and double-check there's no major clustering), then perhaps the collocates and the concordance lines to see how the word is really acting within context. :-)
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Welcome to the course Maria - seems you're already quite far along after just a day! Let us know if you need any help.
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Hi Marina - sorry not sure what you mean. This link will take you directly to the restricted query (https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/shakfinc006/index.php?ui=restrict) and you can get back to the standard query by clicking the top link up the left-hand side.
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Mathew Gillings replied to michael brennan
Anything in particular we can help with Michael?
Access to the MOOC will be lost in 20 days but your CQPweb account is there for life, so feel free to use it even after the course finishes!
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Mathew Gillings replied to Marina Tang
Exactly - and I think in many ways this also links back to a point made earlier in the MOOC about the difference between "big data" methods and corpus linguistics. The former works purely on frequencies (that "sack of words" approach), whereas the latter always requires the researcher to go back into the data and interpret it.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Sana Hussain
Good point Sana. This is the reason why many corpus tools offer the user a range of statistical choices for their analyses; there are ways of organising the results so that it takes into account significance as well as frequency.
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Mathew Gillings replied to Anna Hull
Do you think the risk of bias is greater by using corpus methods than if one was to simply read the works of Shakespeare from beginning to end? If so, why?
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Mathew Gillings replied to Hugh Robertson
Hi Hugh - glad to hear you enjoyed the course!
Just to pick up on a point you make: it is possible to carry out a keyword analysis between the Comparative Plays and the First Folio; likewise it is possible to do the same for Edward II and the history plays, etc., etc.
If you go to "Keywords" up the left-hand side on CQPweb, you can change "Frequency list...
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Mathew Gillings replied to Sana Hussain
Thanks for those kind words Sana - glad to hear you enjoyed the course. Do continue to look around CQPweb, the other corpora and the other tools available on it... plenty more to explore. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Susan Boorman
Anything in particular we might be able to help with Susan? If you’re on Step One then how far did you manage to get?
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Mathew Gillings replied to Teresa Kirby
Ah, I know what you mean now. Yes, it looks like you can also access the Works of Dickens and the Paston Letters via CQPweb. This isn't anything to do with our specific project on the language of Shakespeare - all of our corpora start with "ESC".
CQPweb does not aim to provide access to the works of every literary author. I would guess that a researcher...
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Mathew Gillings replied to Teresa Kirby
Dickens site?
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Hi Ken. Regarding the minimum frequency settings: you are able to change this yourself manually, so the question of whether something appears or not is completely up to you. When you click through to "Keywords" on CQPweb to start your analysis, you can change the "Min. frequency (list 1/2)" under "Options for keyword analysis".
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This is a really good point Teresa - I know several colleagues who are currently doing this kind of work. They gather TV and film transcripts, tag individual characters, and then get an idea of how characters differ from each other, from scene-to-scene, from show-to-show. I can recommend the work of Monika Bednarek if you want to check it out further. :-)
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Mathew Gillings replied to Georgina Owen
Thanks Georgina - enjoy Week 4!
