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This paper presents the Swedish National Doctoral School in Digital Humanities: Data, Culture, and Society – Critical Perspectives (DASH) that is run in 2023–2027 by Uppsala University, Umeå University, Linnaeus University, and Gothenburg University. Though Swedish universities have established PhD courses, MA programmes and training in digital humanities previously, DASH is the first encompassing educational programme in digital humanities at the doctoral level. The present paper discusses the rationale behind the DASH doctoral school, its role in the landscape of Swedish humanities infrastructures, and provides insights from the first PhD courses and seminars. The focus of DASH is to equip PhD candidates in humanities and social sciences with knowledge and skills necessary to pursue high quality, innovative and critical research in digital humanities. DASH aims to provide knowledge in relation to digital research, its methods, tools, and critical perspectives, and to build and strengthen the networks among early career scholars. DASH facilitates access and use of the resources in the national infrastructures in the humanities, but also emerges as an element in the infrastructure by providing new resources and competences.

This paper examines the use of digital resources to integrate authentic legaltexts and materials into courses in English for Specific Purposes for students ofLaw and Economics, with an aim to engage Swedish university students withEnglish in practice and better equip them for professional communication. Thisis especially important given the linguistic situation in Sweden, wherein manyinternational Authors and companies are housed, and English use iswidespread among governmental Authors for public communication. Evendomestically based Authors are exposed to international regulations and EUlaw, often discussed using English as a legal lingua franca.Using digitally available legal archives and databases provides instructors with awealth of material to illustrate differing discourse structures and language usein context. Corpus analysis can then be further implemented in the classroomto illustrate points of grammar and communication, but additionally gained bythe students as a tool they can use to develop their English proficiency outsideof the classroom. Here, results of a preliminary case study involving interviewsand surveys with Swedish students from a course in English for SpecificPurposes for students of Law and Economics are examined, based on theirreflections on assignments and course instruction using discourse and corpusanalysis. Examples of course exercises and materials using such digital datasetsare provided and discussed.It is common practice for students of Law to be offered one optional course inEnglish for Specific Purposes which covers the fundamentals of Englishgrammar and general structures surrounding written and spokencommunication. These often follow a traditional grammar-based curriculum,using a textbook and exercises to teach the rules and conventions, along withsome degree of specificity towards a particular discipline, such as law orbusiness. However, legal professionals are then confronted with a variety oftext types, styles, and internationa

This study examines listeners’ perceived distances between US regional accents and investigates how acoustic-phonetic markers, attitudinal judgments, and identifiability may together impact accent perception. Responses from 80 native and 40 non-native listeners provided perceived distance scores, attitudinal judgements, and categorization results for 7 regional and 1 non-regional samples. A comparison of the regional distributions through hierarchical cluster analyses for vowel formant measurements and perceptual results, accompanied by exploratory factor analysis, reveals a combination of several factors which result in clusters similar to those evident in perceptual distances: 1) markedness, 2) attitude, 3) associations with ‘standardness’, and 4) identifiability. These demonstrate the involvement of perceptions of and pre-existing associations with an identified accent when making a judgement of similarity/difference between varieties, which may furthermore override the initial acoustic information. Based on this investigation, judgements of relatedness between accents are furthermore shown to support previous qualitative models of dialect perception and comprehension

String-edit distances, such as the Levenstien distance, have been used in perceptual-linguistic studies to compare differences among language varieties, based on changes that occur between two speech samples (Gooskens and Heeringa, 2004; Heeringa et al., 2006; Nerbonne et al., 2008). However, this method relies mainly on phonetic transcriptions rather than actual speech data. This work illustrates how acoustic measurements are taken from speech samples from across the United States, and a distance measurement between them is derived for use in further perceptual comparisons (such as perceived distance from standard, intelligibility, appeal, and identification). The speech samples consist of six sentences from various regions of the United States, each sentence containing phonological features that may be marked as perceptually significant for dialect identification (Clopper 2011, Labov et al. 2005, Thomas 2001). The methodology for assessing phonetic distance between two regional varieties is addressed, in particular, by using the Euclidean distance between normalized Bark formants of phonological features within the samples. The benefits and potential disadvantages to using acoustic data vs. transcribed data are addressed as well.