About the JSCC

The JSCC is a collection of the transcribed proceedings from an academic conference, covering current topics in Discourse Analysis. The “Swales Conference” took place at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in June 2006 to celebrate the official retirement of Professor John Swales.

All Swales Conference lectures and question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions were recorded and transcribed in full to create the content of the John Swales Conference Corpus (JSCC). We have made this material publicly available because currently there is a shortage of conference transcripts easily obtainable for either research or pedagogical purposes.

This project aims to supplement another important corpus created and administered by the Michigan Corpus Linguistics Unit at the English Language Institute, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). JSCC will complement MICASE by making accessible speech events that involve interactions between scholars who are experts in one particular field.

We would like to thank a number of people who were involved in the
compilation of the JSCC:

• Begoña Bellés-Fortuño, Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez and Christine A.
  Räisänen for video-taping the conference presentations that comprise the JSCC

• Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, for providing part of the
  funding for the transcription of the JSCC recordings

• Stephen DiDomenico, Caitlin Gdowski, Reese Havlatka, Kristen Keller, and
  Mercedes Querol-Julián and other researchers from GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón,
  Spain) for creating the transcripts

• former and present ELI Corpus Linguistics post-doctoral research fellows
  Stefanie Wulff and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, and MCL
  research assistants Miranda Kozman and Jesse Sielaff for checking the
  transcripts against the audio files and for doing the XML encoding and
  validation

and, of course, John Swales for supporting the project at all stages!

-Ute Römer