The Department of English, Faculty of Languages and Literature, International Islamic University Islamabad organized a postdoctoral webinar titled “Methodological and Technical Considerations in Corpus Development” as part of the postdoctoral research activities under the first Postdoctoral Programme in English Linguistics in Pakistan, introduced by the department.
The webinar was delivered by Dr. Andrew Hardie, a corpus linguist from Lancaster University, United Kingdom. The session was attended by postdoctoral fellows, postgraduate students, and faculty members of English Linguistics. Dr. Hardie discussed conceptual, methodological, and technical aspects involved in corpus development, with particular focus on corpus design, representativeness, balance, metadata structuring, and annotation practices.
He elaborated on technical components including encoding standards, XML-based markup, and levels of linguistic annotation such as part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization. Emphasizing systematic documentation and structured planning, he highlighted the importance of sustainable and reusable corpus resources for long-term linguistic research.
The interactive question-and-answer session allowed participants to seek guidance on methodological and technical challenges in corpus compilation. The session concluded with remarks by Prof. Dr. Fauzia Janjua, Dean, Faculty of Languages and Literature, who appreciated the resource person and participants, and underlined the significance of such academic engagements in strengthening research capacity.
The webinar reflects the Faculty’s continued efforts to promote advanced research practices and international academic collaboration in line with the broader vision of academic excellence at International Islamic University Islamabad.