I come from a very traditional Germanic philology department. I entered it dreaming of a lifetime among medieval manuscripts – but one day, a memo sloppily tacked onto a glass cabinet with endless rows of musty books threw me off that path: the very first lecture on Corpus Linguistics and text search demo! Since then, I have been captivated by the power of linguistic annotation and query languages. They have even  inspired me to learn some statistics and coding. I wish to make this event an interesting (and useful) start for you, too!