Multimodality in language research

Language@Leeds in conjunction with the British Academy is holding a three-day FREE event at the University of Leeds. The event is aimed at Early Career Researchers (up to 5 years post-PhD) and Post-Graduate Researchers working on multimodal approaches to language study from universities in and around Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and the North-West. The aims are to explore the purpose and application of multimodal approaches to language research – textual, visual-gestural, audio, instrumental, computational – and to establish a regional network of scholars to share practice, expertise and resources.

The event will include two workshops and a conference (participants may sign up for all or parts of the event):

Practical workshop on analysing multimodal data (24-25 June)

This workshop aims to provide an introduction to multimodal language use focusing on manual gesture. It includes a hands-on workshop on video recording and annotation with ELAN. It will be led by Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Programme Director, Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, SOAS (http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff63793.php).

Practical workshop on eye-tracking (25 June)

This workshop will give an insight into how to design eye-tracking experiments for language research, record eye-tracking data, and analyse data using R.

Conference on Multimodality in language research (26 June)

The conference keynote speakers will be Sotaro Kita, Professor of Psychology, University   of Warwick (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/psych/people/skita/) and Mandana Seyfeddinipur, SOAS.

Please submit abstracts for oral presentations of maximum 200 words (excluding references) for the conference to Jack Wilson at language@leeds.ac.uk by 31st March 2014. We will respond by 15th April, and anticipate drawing up the conference programme by 15th May.

Organising committee:

Professor Janet Watson, Dr Shirley-Anne Paul, Dr Cat Davies, Dr Sara Ramos Pinto, Jack Wilson.