On 17 September, the Master’s Degree in Languages and Technology (MULT) at the Universitat Politècnica de València welcomed Edgar Bernad-Mechó, Associate Professor at the Universitat Jaume I, who delivered the session Digital Genres: Creating Multimodal Corpora Using GRAPE-MARS as part of the course Corpus Linguistics.
During the three-hour session, held at the Department of Applied Linguistics, students had the opportunity to explore the multimodal nature of communication and the characteristics of oral digital genres in greater depth. The first part of the session introduced key concepts related to multimodality and addressed the main methodological challenges involved in designing and compiling corpora based on audiovisual data.
The second part had a strongly practical focus and centred on the use of GRAPE-MARS 2.0, a tool for multimodal transcription, annotation and analysis whose development team includes Edgar Bernad-Mechó. Students were introduced to different procedures for working with verbal and non-verbal information and explored the possibilities offered by the tool for both quantitative and qualitative analysis.
The activity complemented the course contents by providing a practical introduction to tools and methodologies currently used in research on multimodal discourse. It also encouraged direct interaction between students and external specialists and introduced them to research areas related to corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and language technologies.
On behalf of the Master’s programme, we would like to thank Dr Hanna Skorczynska for inviting Dr Edgar Bernad-Mechó to contribute to the teaching activities of our programme.
This initiative forms part of MULT’s academic enrichment activities and is aligned with the UPV SIRVE Strategic Plan, as it contributes to postgraduate education closely connected with research, innovation and the wider academic and professional environment.