About this page

Welcome to this online collection of corpus-based activities. The exercises that you will find here have been designed to help you explore, analyse, and critically engage with key concepts in social and political life — specifically focusing on core European values such as sustainability and democracy.

Context: the Debating Democracy Project

These activities are informed by and/or adapted from the Debating Democracy project (officially titled Corpus-based Datathons to Support Collaborative, Student-driven Debates on the Key European Values of Sustainability and Democracy).

Concepts like sustainability and democracy often enjoy broad, abstract agreement, yet they spark endless disagreement regarding what they actually mean in practice. In traditional educational programs, however, such foundational concepts are frequently treated as “one-size-fits-all” ideas, reducing implementation to a simple delivery pipeline and risking a democratic deficit.

To address this gap, the Debating Democracy project drew on specialised software interfaces, visualization tools, and electronic corpora of authentic texts (such as the OMC and GoK corpora) to facilitate evidence-based, interdisciplinary conceptual analysis.

You can find more information about the project here.

The Datathon Pedagogical Model

The Debating Democracy project pioneered an innovative educational model inspired by IT hackathons: corpus-based datathons. While the original project brought together students from multiple partner institutions across Europe (including the University of Oslo, University of Agder, Université Paris Cité, University of Perugia, and University of Belgrade) for live, collaborative analysis and debate, these independent activities will eventually allow you to experience a similar evidence-based inquiry at your own pace.

As you work through these activities, you will:

• utilise authentic textual data and digital tools to investigate how key terms are deployed and contested
• move beyond surface-level definitions to uncover the complex reasons and implications behind real-world disagreements
• engage in critical, evidence-driven reflection on values that shape our society.

Feel free to dive into the activities in this mofule whenever you are ready!

Module Compass

Navigate the activities available in this module by clicking on any of the links below:

• rwerwerwrwr
• dfdsfsfsdfsfs
• sdfsdfsfsdfs