Dr Steven Coats is a University Lecturer in English at the University of Oulu and one of the most innovative corpus linguists working at the intersection of language variation, digital data, and computational methods. His work has produced a series of major new spoken-language corpora based on YouTube and ASR data, including corpora of North American, British Isles, Australian and New Zealand, and German speech. He has also made important contributions to the study of regional variation, computer-mediated communication, Twitter and social media discourse, emoji use, Anglicisms, and non-standard grammatical phenomena such as double modals. His recent work shows how noisy, large-scale digital data can be transformed into robust linguistic evidence, opening up new possibilities for corpus-based research. We are therefore delighted to welcome him today as a leading scholar whose work combines methodological innovation with substantive insight into contemporary English and digital language use.
Bonn Talks on Recent Trends in Applied Linguistics Compiling Corpora from Social Media: Combined Audio and Chat Transcripts for Recorded Video Streams
This workshop introduces a Google Colab toolkit for collecting, transcribing, and combining speech and live chat data from recorded YouTube and Twitch video streams. Participants will learn how to retrieve video metadata, download live chat logs, generate automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts with faster-whisper, and integrate multimodal interaction data into unified corpora for analysis. The workflow also demonstrates data structuring, metadata handling, and export formats for downstream computational and corpus-linguistic research. The notebook provides a practical foundation for studying livestream interaction, digital discourse, and multimodal online communication at scale. Workshop participants will utilize Google's Colab service to run Python code on a Jupyter notebook.
