Research Seminar: Geolingual Studies- A New Research Direction

Last week, the BECRP and ICHEN teams had the pleasure of hosting Prof. Carolin Biewer, an international researcher and Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Wuerzburg. Prof. Biewer specializes in World Englishes, urban linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and corpus linguistics.

During her visit, Prof. Biewer led an engaging seminar introducing her groundbreaking work in Geolingual Studies—an interdisciplinary field that integrates methodologies from linguistics, geography, digital humanities, and natural language processing to explore the connection between physical and socio-cultural spaces.

This innovative research area is the result of collaboration between researchers from the University of Wuerzburg’s English Linguistics department and the Earth Observation Research Hub at the German Aerospace Center. Prof. Biewer presented some of the first case studies in this field, which use social media data to analyze perceptions of space, discourse, and behavior in major cities like London, as well as during critical events such as the onset of the war in Ukraine.

The seminar was highly insightful, sparking interest in future collaborations with Prof. Biewer and her team.