To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Helsinki Corpus, the first comprehensive historical corpus of the English language, the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English (VARIENG) is organising an academic conference with a difference. VARIENG is pleased to invite colleagues involved in the development and use of English historical corpora for five days of workshops, thematic sessions, and open discussions, on a variety of topics concerning historical corpus linguistics. Emphasis will be placed on looking ahead at where the discipline is headed in terms of both new developments in digital humanities and the interface between corpus compiling and linguistic methodologies. The programme is available online.

The Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English (VARIENG) is a Finnish Center of Excellence with over 60 active members. Members of VARIENG study English in its social, regional, and discourse contexts, with particular reference to the history of English. VARIENG has a long tradition of corpus compiling, starting with the Helsinki Corpus and followed by dozens of small and medium sized corpora. The tradition of the Helsinki School is particularly associated with philologically informed compilation principles. The Helsinki Corpus was the first historical corpus of English to cover multiple genres from the OE period to EModE. Available on the ICAME CD-ROM and from the Oxford Text Archive, the Helsinki Corpus is one of the most widely used historical corpora of English.

Photos from the Festival by Tanja Säily.

Proceedings of the Helsinki Corpus Festival

There will be two proceedings volumes, one for the main conference and another for the pre-conference event. Both peer-reviewed volumes will be published in the online series Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English.

Organising committee

Alexandra Fodor, Mikko Hakala, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö, Ville Marttila, Terttu Nevalainen (chair), Raisa Oinonen, Minna Palander-Collin, Matti Rissanen, Tanja Säily, Carla Suhr, Irma Taavitsainen, Olga Timofeeva, Jukka Tyrkkö (conference secretary)

Twitter

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Sponsors

The Helsinki Corpus Festival gratefully acknowledges the support and cooperation of the following institutions and companies: