Faculty of Art
Language documentation aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic features of a given language. The traditional ways of documenting languages include participant observation and fieldwork investigation. These approaches are labor intensive and the amount of data collected sometimes is scanty and selective. Nowadays, the use of computer technology drastically changes the ways how language data is processed. Digital language archiving has become a trend not only for language documentation, preservation, and revitalization but also for information management such as textual mining. In this talk, Dr. Andy Chin will introduce the Cantonese digital archive developed at The Education University of Hong Kong: “The Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese” 二十世紀中期香港粵語語料庫 (hkcc.eduhk.hk). I will share with the audience the rationale and the design of the archive, and how the archival data can benefit research in humanities.
Dr. Andy Chin 錢志安博士 is Head of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies as well as Associate Director of Centre for Research on Linguistics and Language Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. Andy’s research interest includes corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and Cantonese linguistics. He has published in: Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Language and Linguistics, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 《民族語文》, 《語言學論叢》, among other venues.
Dr. Chin has received a number of prestigious research awards: Young Scholar Award of The International Association of Chinese Linguistics (2009), The President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Research at the (then) Hong Kong Institute of Education (2013). The Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese has received much attention from the media since its launch in 2012 and won the Gold Medal and Special Award at the Silicon Valley International Invention Festival 2019.
This webinar is co-organized by the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative and the Cantonese Language Program as well as co-sponsored by: Department of Asian Studies, Department of History, Centre for Chinese Research, Asian Library, and the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster.