Transforming Humanities Research into Digital Humanities Research: The Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese University Library (October 27, 2023)
Digital technology has created a profound impact on traditional humanities research, giving rise to the field of Digital Humanities. One notable application of digital humanities in linguistics is the construction of linguistic corpora with a massive amount of authentic and natural language data. Corpora offer quantitative and qualitative data on language use, enabling detailed analysis of language structures, and providing valuable insights into language variations, change over time, and (new) linguistic patterns.
This talk is about corpus-based studies of Cantonese, a language spoken by nearly 90% of the Hong Kong’s population as the first language. In the past, Cantonese was mainly studied as a Chinese dialect under the Chinese dialectological framework. Since the 1990s, various Cantonese corpora of different nature were constructed for linguistic and humanities research.
In 2013, under the support of RGC’s ECS, I developed The Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese (https://hkcc.eduhk.hk/). The corpus, with a size of nearly 900,000 characters, was constructed by transcribing the dialogues from 80 black-and-white Cantonese movies produced in Hong Kong between 1940 and 1970. The corpus provides real time language data for documenting, preserving, and revitalizing the Cantonese language and its culture of the then Hong Kong. [Go to the full record in the library's catalogue]
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