Faculty of humanities research infrastructure

The Archaeological Research Laboratory was established in Greens villa by Professor Birgit Arrhenius in 1976. In the beginning, the operation was dominated by conservation and phosphate analyses of soil samples, but in the last few decades a series of new techniques have been developed for the study of archaeological source material. The Archaeological Research Laboratory is unique in the Nordic countries in the sense that these are archaeologists working on archaeological issues using scientific methods of analysis. The methods used have been adapted to the often degraded and fragmented source material, which places specific requirements on the analyses.

Contact person: Kerstin Lidén kerstin.liden@arklab.su.se

Osteoarchaeology is one of the special profile disciplines at the department, where students receive specialized training in the handling of skeletal archaeological finds. Teaching at the laboratory is broad-based and encompasses both human and animal osteology. The discipline lies on the borderland between science and the arts, since osteological data form the basis for interpretations of cultural history. Both basic research and more specialized research is conducted at the laboratory, concerning topics such as human living conditions and the subsistence economy during the Stone Age, Iron Age and Medieval Period (animal husbandry, fishing, hunting) and the faunal history of Scandinavia. Newer areas of research include paleopathology in animals, palaeohistopathology and oral histopathology.

For more information contact:
Anna Kjellström
E-mail: anna.kjellstrom@ofl.su.se
Tel: 08-16 12 93

Address:
Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, Wallenberg Laboratory, Lilla Frescativägen 7, 114 18 Stockholm

The Ormulum Project is a long-term research project at the English Department at Stockholm University, and formally based at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Between 1993 and 2019, it was the sole work of Professor Nils-Lennart Johannesson (1948-2019), who produced an astonishing amount of work on the every aspect of the language and provenance of the Ormulum.

The Ormulum is a 12th-century Middle English manuscript of great complexity. It represents the only surviving part of a much larger book of sermons, written in the local dialect of Southern Lincolnshire with a unique alphabet. Indeed, it represents the only significant textual source of language from that time and place, shortly after the Norman conquest, when English was undergoing a significant, irreversable change from Old English to Middle English.

After 30 years of work at the English Department at Stockholm University, a new critical edition of the book has been released, the first one since 1878.

Read more about the resources

Director of the Ormulum Project: Andrew Cooper

At the Department of Linguistics, there is a high quality infrastructure for research at different levels, from specially equipped labs to databases and language resources.

The Phonetics Laboratory offers advanced research conditions for experimental studies of speech perception and production.

The Phonetics Laboratory resources include extensive testing facilities, state-of-the-art equipment, and elaborated data analysis software. The technical staff at the laboratory assist in the development of new research methods and in adjusting the equipment to the requirements of each individual study. Among the resources are:

• an anechoic chamber for acoustic recordings with the highest level of experimental control
• other soundproof rooms for qualified sound- and video recordings
• electrically shielded laboratories for speech physiology and electrophysiology experiments
• facilities for accomodating children as research subjects
• laboratories equipped for perceptual experiments and for measuring electrical activity in the brain with EEG
• a teaching lab equipped with computer software for speech analysis and signal processing

Director: Mattias Heldner, mattias.heldner@ling.su.se

Find more information and contacts at the Phonetics Laboratory website

The Department of Linguistics provides various linguistic data resources that are useful for empirical language research, primarily in the form of “corpora”, or language databases, that represent different types of texts. Corpora may include modern or older texts, or spoken language that has been recorded and transcribed into text form, such as children’s or adults’ language learning and/or use.

The text is usually annotated, or “tagged”, which means that it is marked with and connected to various types of metadata, such as grammatical categories or comments.

Learn more about the corpora and resources

Part of the research space in the Phonetics Laboratory is specially adapted for research in Infant Language Development.

Studies of infant perception require special testing methods that utilise children’s natural curiosity and playfulness. The Stockholm Babylab research facilities include systems for EEG registration, eye-tracking measurements, High-Amplitude Sucking (HAS), and Head-Turn Procedure. The space is designed specifically to create a comfortable environment for the children and parents who participate in the studies. Next to the lab, there is a waiting room with facilities.

More about Stockholm Babylab

hThe Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre (SUBIC) provides infrastructure for brain imaging research focusing on human and animal brain function.

The research conducted at the centre encompasses linguistics and behavioural sciences in the humanities and social sciences, law, as well as zoology, mathematics and other scientific disciplines.

Contact person: Rita Almeida

SUBIC's website

The long-term goal of the “Swedish Sign Language Dictionary” is to publish a complete sign language dictionary. The lexicographic group at the Sign Language Section, Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University, has documented about 19,000 signs.

This lexical database, which was made freely available online on 18 December 2008, is updated continuously with new signs. Most of the signs are accompanied by sign demonstrations, sign variations, usage examples, and photo illustrations. The dictionary currently contains around 5 500 example sentences. It can be searched in a number of ways, including by word, translation, other meanings of the sign, alternative signs, handshape and subject area.

Swedish Sign Language Dictionary

The Swedish Sign Language Corpus is a database for the Swedish sign language. The corpus is produced by sign language speakers to facilitate teaching and research on sign language.

The purpose of our extensive project Swedish Sign Language Corpus is to publish a collection of texts, a corpus, in sign language. It should provide a picture of what sign language sentences look like, but also contribute to new signs and variants to the Swedish Sign Language Dictionary and be used to develop teaching materials.

The corpus material is freely available with the web-based corpus tool STS-corpus, this for use in teaching, research and sign language lexicography.

Swedish Sign Language Corpus

Språkstudion is the Stockholm University language learning resource centre. The resource centre is commissioned by the Faculty of Humanities and provides tools and infrastructure for language study, teaching and research.

Språkstudion collaborates with all language departments to have the right materials, media tools and environments for language practise and linguistic analysis. In addition, Språkstudion has a well-equipped recording studio with professional recording equipment for audio and video, including a large green screen. sound engineers have many years of experience recording and editing audiovisual material, and can provide advice on content and form for your productions.

Director: Christine Ericsdotter Nordgren christine.ericsdotter@sprakstudion.su.se

Språkstudion's website

Natural language processing tools developed by the Computational linguistics staff och the Department of Linguistics.

The tools include a word aligner eflomal and a PoS-tagger and named entity recognizer efselab.

Computational linguistics – tools

Stockholm University has been responsible for the Strindberg Project since 1986. The project oversees the National Edition of Strindberg’s Collected Works.

Through this humanities mega-project, all of August Strindberg's texts are now available in their original form. The publication of the National Edition of August Strindberg's ‘Collected Works’ is the result of over 40 years of solid research. An important principle during the work has been that the texts should be readable by everyone, and a lot of work has therefore been put into glossaries and commentaries.

Chair of the Strindberg Project: Gunnel Engwall, Professor at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics.

Read more about the publication (in Swedish)

Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages – Communicative Patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish is a research programme by partners Stockholm University, University of Helsinki , University of Turku and the Institute for Language and Folklore in Gothenburg.

Project manager: Catrin Norrby.

IVIP website

This is tagged as a second-language corpus with digitised second-language texts from TISUS – Test in Swedish for University Studies. The corpus includes the writers’ background information, such as age, gender, first language, educational background, etc. Developed in collaboration with the Swedish Language Bank in Gothenburg.

Contact person: Peter Lundqvist peter.lundkvist@su.se

A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law (LMNL) is a multilingual reference work designed to make terminology from several medieval legal texts more accessible to English-speaking audiences. It contains over 7,000 Nordic headwords, more than 10,000 English equivalents and approximately 13,200 cross-references. It is intended to function as a general lexicon of medieval Nordic legal terminology. Where possible the editors have combined related terms in multiple languages under the same headword in order to highlight similarities throughout the Nordic region during the Middle Ages.

The work has been carried out at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, in collaboration with colleagues in Norway and the UK, and funded by the Swedish Research Council (2014-2017).

The lexicon is now available as a fully searchable database at the University of Sheffield

More about the project

The project has set up a portal and an infrastructure for text collection, pseudonymization, normalization, and correction annotation of written learner  production. A linguistically and correction annotated learner corpus of 500 adult learner texts are now available for Swedish as a second language at all learner levels. Another 200 are pseudonymized and searchable. The learner corpus can be found at Språkbanken at the University of Gothenburg.

Contact person: Gunlög Sundberg

The Multilingualism Laboratory at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism has available space and equipment for experimental data collection, such as EEG/ERP, Eye Tracking and behavioural experiments, as well as equipment for fieldwork and for recording of group discussions.

The Multilingualism Laboratory is available for researchers, graduate students, as well as undergraduate students, and for large as well as for small projects.

Director: Niclas Abrahamsson

The Multilingualism Laboratory website 

The Interpreting Studio at the Institute of Interpretation and Translation (TÖI) is the first and only professional interpreting studio for training interpreters in Sweden. The studio has six soundproof interpreting booths with associated equipment, a large common room and all the necessary technology for professional interpreter training.