New online tool to study the works of Charles Dickens

Academics from The University of Nottingham have designed a new online linguistics tool that will help researchers and students to study the language used in novels from the 19th Century.

Professor Michaela Mahlberg from the University’s Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL) is leading a project team to develop the CLiC online interface — this can be used to employ computer-assisted methods to study literary texts, which will in turn lead to new insights into how readers perceive fictional characters.

The CLiC interface uses corpus linguistic methods to allow the user to search for words in different types of contexts, for example, in fictional speech, or in narrative stretches likely to contain body language; the tool provides frequency information, different display options for words in context, and enables comparisons of frequency data across texts.

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