How does it affect us when we read an article about the Christopher Street Day that begins with the word “makeup” — and what if it mentions a protest instead? And why are there more reports about supposedly gay penguins, but fewer about lesbians??
Queer linguistics asks these and other questions, using analyses of large text collections, or corpora, to investigate which words relating to gender and sexuality occur frequently in which contexts—or are omitted—and supplements this with qualitative approaches to the data.
Linguistics students need *data literacy and computational linguistics skills to perform such analyses. This is precisely where the teaching project led by Prof. Dr. Lars Sörries-Vorberger and Carla Sökefeld comes in. In a combined seminar and practical course, students are introduced step by step to the field of digital humanities and develop their own research questions in queer and discourse linguistics.
The goal: low-threshold access to methods in computational, corpus, and discourse linguistics and the development of critical data literacy in queer linguistics.
The subject-specific teaching project “Queer Approaches to Corpus and Discourse Linguistics” is funded by the Digital and Data Literacy in Teaching Lab (DDLitLab for short) and was successfully carried out last semester at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Hamburg. In this interview, Lars and Carla provide insights into the didactic concept and learning content of the course.