On May 3rd, 2021, Professor Javier Pérez-Guerra (哈维尔·佩雷斯·格拉), Professor of Universidad de Vigo, delivered his first lecture to the teachers and students of School of Foreign Languages via Tencent Meeting between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.. He is scheduled to give five lectures aboutLinguistic Variation in English: From Data to Theoryfrom May 3rdto May 7th, 2021. The first lecture intitled “Research-project design: data, statistics, visualisation and interpretation” was hosted by Prof. Yang Chaojun, Dean of School of Foreign Languages. Nearly 300 postgraduates and faculty members joined the lecture with interest and excitement.
Professor Javier Pérez-Guerraobtained a position as tenured Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in January 2001, and in December 2017 became Professor at theUniversity of Vigo, where he coordinates the research groupLanguage Variation and Textual Categorisation. Professor Javier Pérez-Guerra was the supervisor of the PhD dissertations. He is also heavily involved in journal editing: current review editor of Folia Linguistica, between 2005 and 2008 co-editor ofSEDERI(Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies), and editor ofResearch in Corpus Linguistics(RiCL). Over the years he has held visiting positions at the Universities of Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Oxford, Helsinki, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, California at Santa Barbara, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Cambridge, Kent, Wisconsin-Madison and Lancaster.
In the course of this lecture, Professor Javier Pérez-Guerra systematically introduces three core elements of Research Design (RD): data collection, statistical analysis, visualization and its interpretation. (1) There are many ways to collect the data, such as introspection, corpus-based method, elicitation with stimuli. In addition, data collection requires ethical concerns, such as protecting the privacy of subjects. (2) Regarding statistics, it is operated on the basis of data collection. The encoding of data can be directly borrowed from the tagged corpus, and it can also be guided some specific theoretical frameworks. In addition, it is necessary to clarify the data types, set the parameters and variables, and put forward the research hypothesis. (3) Visualization is to display the data results in a visual way, such as bar chart, pie chart, line chart and so on. Professor Javier Pérez-Guerra mainly recommends R language statistics software, from which multiple correspondence analysis, correlation statistics, cluster analysis, conditional inference decision tree, random forest analysis, et can be applied in visualization.
Prof. Javier Pérez-Guerra’s thought-provoking lecture offers us the penetrating and insightful ideas in Research Design (RD). His passion, humor and experiences spark students interest in RD and its applications in various areas.
