Basic Perl programming for (corpus) linguists

This intensive course is intended to lay the groundwork for students who want to become independent of standard corpus tools such as AntConc or Wordsmith in their analyses of large electronically stored texts (i.e. corpora). This will be achieved with the help of the programming language Perl (http://www.perl.org), if time permits in combination with a relational database tool such as MySQL (http://www.mysql.com). No previous programming experience is required; in fact, students who already know Perl (or a similar language such as Ruby or Python) will probably not benefit a lot from this course. Although I will be using English data to demonstrate the power of Perl scripting, students of other languages are explicitly invited to participate, as the strategies presented can easily be adapted to non-English data.

The course will run on the following dates:

• Wednesday, 1 October - Friday, 3 October
• Wednesday, 8 October & Thursday 9 October

We’ll start in the first session by writing a simple concordancing tool, which will be expanded as additional functionality of Perl is introduced in later sessions. A second project will be a set of scripts that automatically downloads data from the Internet and converts them to a format that is suitable for corpus analysis. In both cases, writing a script rather than having to rely on off-the-shelf tools empowers the user to be as flexible and specific as they wish – thereby potentially saving days, weeks or possibly even months of their time that would otherwise have to be spent on tedious manual work.

1.10. 12:00-13:00 Sign-up to external UNIX account, technical set-up, etc.
1.10. 13:00-15:00 Session 1
1.10. 15:00-17:00 Guided practice 1
1.10. 17:00-18:00 Individual support (if required)

2.10. 12:00-15:00 Session 2
2.10. 15:00-17:00 Guided practice 2
2.10. 17:00-18:00 Individual support (if required)

3.10. 09:00-12:00 Session 3

8.10. 13:00-15:00 Session 4
8.10. 15:00-17:00 Guided practice 4
8.10. 17:00-18:00 Individual support (if required)

9.10. 12:00-15:00 Session 5
9.10. 15:00-17:00 Guided practice 5
9.10. 17:00-18:00 Individual support (if required)

Participation would be essential for the actual sessions and strongly encouraged for guided practice (but not required).