Language in context seminar

Speakers: Dr Lauren Hall-Lew, Dr Claire Cowie, Dr Catherine Lai, Nina Markl and Stephen McNulty (University of Edinburgh, Linguistics)

Title: Sociolinguistics in 2020: The Lothian Diary Project

Abstract: This seminar will introduce audience members to the Lothian Diary Project. The Lothian Diary Project is a research project at the University of Edinburgh which is investigating the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on people residing in Edinburgh and the Lothians through the medium of video diaries. The interdisciplinary research team is made up of linguists, political scientists, data scientists and psychotherapists, and will build on the existing collections of Edinburgh Speaks. Video diaries are a novel way of conducting social science research in the pandemic and can draw attention to individual experiences to complement a wealth of survey data. The practice of self-recording is a contrast to the kind of speech data collected in traditional sociolinguistic interviews. Participants are asked to create a short video diary to tell us about their experiences since the beginning of the pandemic, and how their lives have changed as a result of the government-imposed restrictions. A sample of the diaries will be archived by Museums and Galleries Edinburgh as valuable oral history of the pandemic. The collection now features over 100 contributors, and more diaries are being added, especially from digitally excluded groups. We encourage you to contribute to our interactive map of lockdown before the seminar (and during the seminar!). In this talk, we will show some example videos and our impressions so far of the content analysis.

Further information

• Lothian Diary Project
• Edinburgh Speaks
• The Lothian Video Diaries Map of Lockdown
• News item: Three PPLS researchers to collect COVID-19 video diaries from Edinburgh & Lothian residents