Research Seminar: Geolingual Studies- A New Research Direction

Last week, the BECRP and ICHEN team were visited by international researcher Prof. Carolin Biewer. Prof. Biewer is Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Wuerzburg, where she teaches World Englishes, urban linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and corpus linguistics.

The team were thrilled to be able to host her for a seminar where she presented her new area of research, Geolingual studies.  Geolingual studies combines the methodologies from linguistics, geography, digital humanities, and natural language processing to assess the interrelationship between the physical and socio-cultural space.

This innovative, multidiciplinary area of research was established through the collaboration of researchers from English Linguistics at the University of Wuerzburg and from the Earth Observation Research Hub and the Earth Observation Center of the German Aerospace Center.

During the seminar Prof. Biewer introduced the general idea behind geolingual studies and presented some of the first case studies, where social media data was used to talk about perceptions of space, discourses and/or behaviour in space in big cities like London or during disastrous events like the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

It was an insightful seminar and hopefully the begining of future collorations with Prof. Biewer and her team.