Oxford Voices at ICAME47
Among the many highlights of ICAME47 has been the presence of researchers from the University of Oxford, bringing with them the distinctive perspective of one of the world’s most storied institutions. Martin Wynne (Oxford Text Archive) contributed both a workshop and a poster, marking a particularly special moment: the Oxford Text Archive celebrates its own 50th anniversary in 2026. His talks traced fifty years of curating digital language resources — from the early days of the Oxford Concordance Programme and the launch of the Text Encoding Initiative, through the construction of the British National Corpus, to today’s repository of more than 70,000 items — while looking ahead to the opportunities and challenges that AI brings for trusted, authentic language data.
Equally fascinating was Xingni Li‘s poster on speech prosody and rap flows in American English and Cantonese — a cross-linguistic study examining how the rhythmic and tonal features of two very different languages shape their respective rap traditions, and how Cantonese rap appears to be drifting toward the conventions of American English rap. A refreshingly novel topic for a corpus linguistics conference, and a reminder of just how far the field’s methods can travel.
It has been wonderful to have Oxford represented so richly at ICAME47, and we thank Martin and Xingni for their thoughtful contributions.