Please find below a call for papers that may be of interest to many members of the CORPORA mailing list.
Call for papers:
ICAME 2027 pre-conference workshop: Towards "big and tidy" in English corpus linguistics
The increasing availability of very large corpora, advances in corpus annotation, and recent developments in AI-assisted data enrichment are creating new opportunities to rethink one of the longstanding assumptions of corpus linguistics: that corpora are either "small and tidy" or "big and messy". At ICAME 2027 in Helsinki, we invite contributions to a pre-conference workshop that explores how corpus resources may increasingly combine large scale with rich and systematic metadata.
The workshop will bring together researchers working with large-scale corpora, corpus enrichment, AI-assisted annotation, sociolinguistics, and digital methods to discuss the methodological, theoretical, and practical implications of richer large-scale datasets. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions from all areas of corpus linguistics. Please find the full call for papers below. Abstracts (max. 400 words, excluding references) should be submitted by 15 December 2026 to turo.vartiainen@helsinki.fi and mikko.laitinen@uef.fi. We look forward to receiving your proposals and to welcoming you to Helsinki.
Towards “big and tidy” in English corpus linguistics Conveners: Turo Vartiainen (University of Helsinki) and Mikko Laitinen (University of Eastern Finland) The landscape of corpus linguistics has changed rapidly owing to the availability of increasingly extensive data resources, advances in corpus annotation, and the emergence of more sophisticated analytical methods (Nevalainen et al., 2019). Contemporary corpora are measured in billions of words, and large-scale datasets compiled from social media have expanded the scope of corpus linguistics considerably. Bigger resources make it possible to investigate low-frequency phenomena that would previously have remained beyond the reach of corpus-based analysis (Grieve et al., 2018; Vartiainen & Höglund, 2020). They also enable re-examining questions that have traditionally been investigated using substantially smaller datasets (Laitinen et al., 2025; Schweinberger et al., 2026).
Alongside the growth of corpus resources, attention has been devoted to the use of AI-assisted methods in data enrichment of existing corpora. New layers of linguistic, social, and contextual annotation create opportunities for variationist corpus-based research and introduce avenues of thinking how new digital approaches can support corpus development (e.g. Fonteyn et al., 2025; Säily & Vartiainen, fc., Säily et al., 2025; Fatemi et al., fc.).
Taken together, these developments point towards a new generation of corpus resources that combine the scale traditionally associated with "big and messy" corpora and the analytical richness commonly associated with "small and tidy" datasets (Mair, 2006). The availability of enriched large-scale datasets suggests that the longstanding distinction between these two approaches may become increasingly blurred and raises important methodological, theoretical, and practical questions about the future direction of big and tidy data in corpus linguistics. The workshop aims to bring together scholars working on corpus enrichment, AI-assisted annotation, and novel corpus architectures to discuss how richer big data in corpus linguistics could lead to new openings. We invite contributions from scholars working on any subfield of corpus linguistics. Possible topics could include, but need not be limited to, revisiting classic sociolinguistic questions, such as the gender paradox (Labov, 2001) or the role of social networks (Milroy, 1987), both of which were formulated on the basis of comparatively limited datasets. Beyond revisiting established questions, big and tidy resources could offer new research directions. For example, new ego-centric corpora from social media, with the primary metadata centered on individuals, could facilitate a more nuanced understanding of variation and contact on an individual level (Fatemi & Laitinen, 2025) and open new avenues for research in World Englishes in specific sociolinguistic settings (cf. Buschfeld & Kautzsch, 2020).
We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that engage with the issues outlined above or related topics such as: Big data and linguistic inquiry
* How can large-scale corpus resources be used in innovative ways to advance our understanding of language variation and change? * How can enriched big-data resources be used to reassess established questions and theories in variationist linguistics? * What kinds of research questions become possible only through the use of very large datasets? * What methodological challenges arise when working with increasingly large and complex corpora?
Corpus annotation and enrichment
* How can new layers of annotation be added to existing corpora in ways that enhance their long-term sustainability and research value? (see, e.g., Vartiainen & Höglund, 2020) * How can machine learning and AI be used to support corpus annotation, classification, and enrichment? (see, e.g., Fonteyn et al., 2025) * What are the strengths and limitations of AI-assisted corpus development? * What new theoretical perspectives are enabled by increasingly rich forms of corpus annotation? * How can researchers evaluate the reliability, validity, and interpretability of automatically generated annotations?
Depending on the number of proposals, we envisage this workshop to be either full-day or half-day. The format is 20+10 minutes. After the workshop, the aim is to edit a special issue with peer-reviewed contributions in an international journal. Please send in your abstracts (max 400-words excluding references) to both turo.vartiainen@helsinki.fi and mikko.laitinen@uef.fi by 15 December, 2026. References Buschfeld, S., & Kautzsch, A. (Eds.) (2020). Modelling world Englishes: A joint approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial varieties. Edinburgh University Press. Fatemi, M., & Laitinen, M. (2025). From tweets to networks: Introducing four large network-based social media corpora. CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 2025. In C. Crisot, & T. Kontino. Vienna, Austria, 2025. pp. 100–104. (https://www.clarin.eu/sites/default/files/CLARIN2025_ConferenceProceedings.p...) Fatemi, M., Laitinen, M., & Fränti, P. Forthcoming. Computer-mediated communication and networks: Quantifying ego network strength. Language@Internet. Fonteyn, L., Manjavacas, E., & De Regt, J. (2025). Using machine learning to automate data annotation in corpus linguistics. A case study with MacBERTh. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 30(3), 296–315. 10.1075/ijcl.22088.fon Grieve, J., Nini, A., & Guo, D. (2018). Mapping lexical innovation on American social media. Journal of English Linguistics 46(4) 293–319. 10.1177/0075424218793191 Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 2, Social factors. Blackwell. Laitinen, M., Rautionaho, P., Fatemi, M., & Halonen, M. (2025). Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks. Lingua 320. 103931. 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931 Mair, C. (2006). Tracking ongoing grammatical change and recent diversification in present-day standard English: The complementary role of small and large corpora. In A. Renouf, & A. Kehoe (Eds.), The changing face of corpus linguistics: Papers from the 24th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 24) (pp. 355–376). Rodopi. Milroy, L. (1987). Language and social networks. 2nd edition. Blackwell. Nevalainen, T., Suhr, C., & Taavitsainen, I. (2019). Corpus linguistics as digital scholarship: Big data, rich data and uncharted data. In. C. Suhr, T. Nevalainen, & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), From data to evidence in English language research (pp. 1–26). Brill. Schweinberger, M., Haugh, M., Laitinen, M., Fatemi, M., Hames, S., Rautionaho, P., & Takahashi, M. (2026). Swearing online: Exploring dimensions of variability in born-digital data. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 10.1093/llc/fqag070 Säily, T., Perek, F., & Suomela, J. (2025). Variation and change in the productivity of BE going to V in the Corpus of Historical American English, 1810–2009. English Language and Linguistics 29(2), 362–388. Säily, T., & Vartiainen, T. Forthcoming. Historical linguistics. In G. Brookes, M. Mahlberg, & N. Curry (Eds.), The Bloomsbury handbook of corpus linguistics. Bloomsbury Academic. Vartiainen, T., & Höglund, M. (2020). How to make new use of existing resources: Tracing the history and geographical variation of off of. American Speech 95(4), 408–440. 10.1215/00031283-8620491
-- Mikko Laitinen, PhD Professor of English mikko.laitinen@uef.fi PI of COMET Weak-tie hypothesis in complex digital networks (Research Council of Finland 2024-28) PI of FIN-CLARIAH Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (2022-2029) https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/person/mikko.laitinen/ --