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  • Corpus Linguistics Course Week 1

    This week I started a FutureLearn/Lancaster University course on Corpus Linguistics (CL). It runs for 8 weeks and is much more work than any of the previous FutureLearn courses that I have undertaken, so whether I’ll get to the end of it remains to be seen. But the course leader suggests that once we get…

  • New Starts part 2

    Last week I wrote about the first of my two small research projects, so this week I want to introduce the second: Fake News and Facts in Topical Ballads. This will be a digital humanities project which will use corpus data analysis to look at the links between ballad and pamphlet news. Shakespeare’s ballad-seller Autolycus…

  • New Starts part 1

    The new academic year is approaching fast and things are changing. While I wait to hear what work I’ve got and where, I’ve been getting on with my own research. Several of my projects are almost at an end, so I need to work out which of my projects to dive into next. There are…

  • Jigs

    A couple of years ago I was sitting in the British Library calling up various documents that might be ballad-related, when I came across John Balshaw’s Jig. What really captured my interest was the fact that Balshaw apparently wrote the piece in Brindle, Lancashire, in 1660. Now Brindle is a little place near Chorley, and…

  • Re-blogged from The Research Whisperer: Stitching together an intellectual life

    Stitching together an intellectual life Stitching together an intellectual life — Read on researchwhisperer.org/2019/08/20/stitching-together-an-intellectual-life/