The ARC Discovery Project “Voices of Regional Australia” examines English as spoken in regional Australia, addressing a significant gap in research on Australian English that to date has been largely focused on major urban centres. The project has at its heart the compilation of a corpus of spontaneous speech, combining existing oral history recordings (made to create the podcast series, “Heart of the Storm”) with new interviews (that will be made for this project), all centred around the topic of bushfires.

The particular project the summer scholar will conduct will depend on their own interests and background, but some possibilities are:

• reviewing content of the oral histories, and creating a sub-corpus of thematically aligned segments;
• developing and applying a methodology to systematically extract socio-demographic information from the recordings;
• working with transcriptions produced from ASR, including validation and correction;
• conducting linguistic analyses of a feature (or features) in a sub-section of the corpus, for comparison with data from urban Australian English (e.g. Sydney Speaks)

Applicants with a background in linguistics or related field (including anthropology, sociology, history) will be considered. We particularly welcome applications from people with experience in regional Australia, as well as from people with the following skills (all underpinned by generic computing/coding skills):

• editing, manipulating and annotating audio recordings

• searching through orthographic transcriptions of speech to find particular information or conversational themes
• working with large-scale databases of recorded speech with various layers of annotation

Chief investigators: Catherine Travis, Ksenia Gnevsheva, (and Gerry Docherty, from Griffith U.)