ROGER

On Thursday, September 26, 2019, the 1st year BA students of the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology participated in a workshop prepared by the researchers team of the ROGER project, a workshop that was named #DIGITTworld – Digital Linguistics Workshop. In the first part of the workshop, dr. Mădălina Chitez and assist. dr. Roxana Rogobete presented the mission of ROGER project to the students.

The main aspects discussed during the workshop were the project’s objectives, the sources of funding, the digital age and, implicitly, the digital tools that help to carry out the research work in the Humanities, but also the importance of improving the academic writing in Romania, by carrying out some ongoing research. Furthermore, the students were acquainted with certain key concepts of the project, namely corpus, corpus linguistics, digital humanities, but also with the activity that the researchers of the ROGER project have undertaken, through participation in different international conferences, since 2017, respectively by presenting the results of an academic gender questionnaire (ROGS), which was applied in the universities of Romania and, implicitly, in the Western University of Timișoara. Also, the 1st year students were presented some opportunities that they can have by being involved in the ROGER project, through volunteering and / or practice activities.

In the second part of the workshop, assist. dr. Loredana Bercuci and Andreea Dincă carried out, together with the students, a series of extremely interesting practical activities regarding corpus linguistics. For example, they were able to observe, with the help of online tools, certain constant occurrences of words in a specific corpus of texts or even the analysis of some well-known vloggers’ language.

The students were enthusiastic about this activity, arousing their interest for future activities in which they could be involved. The activity ended with an extremely interactive and amusing quiz on linguistics, which brought some delicious ”prizes” to the students with the best answers.