Author Archives: Carmen Dayrell

More on drought: The ENDOWS project

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We are thrilled to announce that our latest bid was successful – ENDOWS: ENgaging diverse stakeholders and publics with outputs from the UK DrOught and Water Scarcity programme.

The ENDOWS project will capitalise on the outcomes from four existing projects within NERC’s UK Drought and Water Scarcity programme (Historic Droughts, DRY, MaRIUS and IMPETUS) to maximise impact. ENDOWS will exploit the synergies between these projects, promote active interaction among disciplines, and develop close collaboration with a diverse range of stakeholders (policy makers, water companies, NGOs and community leaders). The project therefore opens up the possibility of genuinely enhancing and innovating the UK planning and management of future drought events.

Funded by NERC, this is a two-year project which brings together a multi-disciplinary team of 37 researchers from 12 UK universities or research centres and Climate Outreach, one of Europe’s leading voices on public engagement:

  • Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH)
  • University of West England
  • University of Oxford
  • Cranfield University
  • The University of Reading
  • University of Bristol
  • British Geological Survey (BGS)
  • Sheffield University
  • Harper Adams University
  • University of Exeter
  • Lancaster University
  • Loughborough University
  • University of Warwick

Carmen Dayrell is the Co-Investigator at Lancaster University. She has been working with Tony McEnery and Helen Baker as part of the CASS team within the Historic Droughts project. CASS is examining how British newspapers have debated drought and water scarcity events in UK, covering 200 years of discourse: 1850 to 2014. The analysis uses an innovative methodological approach which combines Critical Discourse Analysis with methods from Corpus Linguistics and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), enabling the researchers to examine the link between textual patterns and geographic references and hence explore geographically bounded discourses.

To illustrate the interesting results that this type of analysis can yield, let’s have a look at the places appearing around the word “drought” in newspaper texts published between 2010 and 2012. These were years when England and Wales were hit hard by drought. The bigger the dot in the maps, the higher the number of mentions.

 

Figure 1: 2010-2012 drought in Britain (tabloid)

 

 

Figure 2: 2010-2012 drought in Britain (broadsheet)

 

A closer reading of texts unveils interesting patterns:

  • The press does not always specify the specific locations impacted by the drought. Britain and England were by far the places most frequently mentioned.
  • When mentioning specific locations, these were usually in England.

Large areas of Britain face drought conditions, the Environment Agency said. Parts of the Midlands and Yorkshire are expected to be declared high risk in the agency’s drought prospects report.

The Telegraph 11/03/2012

  • Rather than impacted by the drought, Scotland was portrayed as the solution for the problem since it is rich in water resources.

SCOTLAND yesterday offered to provide water to drought-hit Southern England. Infrastructure Secretary Alex Neil said it was “only right” to offer some of Scotland’s “plentiful supply of water “. 

The Express, 10/03/2012

  • The newspapers also report on actions taken to address the problem of drought. Applications for drought orders and permits and the introduction of hosepipe bans were the most frequently mentioned.

The remaining area in drought is South and West of a line from Lincolnshire to Sussex, taking in Oxfordshire, where hosepipe bans imposed by seven water companies remain in place.

The Independent, 19/05/2012

  • There were also mentions of the impact of the drought. These mainly related to: (i) wildlife and plants/gardens being affected and (ii) water levels of rivers and reservoirs going low.

SCIENTISTS fear rare eel species could be completely wiped out because of drought in the South of England.

The Daily Record, 17/07/2011

River levels are as low as in 1976 after another very dry week across England and Wales, the Environment Agency said. In its latest drought briefing yesterday, the Government agency said all areas had seen less than 1mm of rain.

The Herald, 31/03/2012

By examining 200 years of newspaper discourse, the analysis can trace repeated patterns and changes across time. This in turn can inform ways of thinking about how the media representation of drought has influenced the way in which the British public perceives and responds to drought events. Thus, the newspaper analysis will contribute to fostering more informed dialogues between policy makers, water companies, and community leaders and the general public.

CASS Changing Climates project presented at the University of Turin

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Carmen blog 2

It was a great honour and pleasure to present CASS Changing Climates project to an engaging audience at the University of Turin last month, on 27th April 2016. This was the 8th symposium on ‘Energy and Power: Social ontology perspectives and energy transitions’ as part of a UNESCO Chair programme in Sustainable Development and Territory Management currently hosted by University of Turin (Italy), under the coordination of Professor Dario Padovan.

Carmen blog 1

The symposium brought together academics and students from various disciplines – sociology, linguistics, history and environmental sciences –, thus having an enthusiastic audience and resulting in a lively debate. CASS would like to thank the organisers Professor Dario Padovan, Dr Maria Cristina Caimotto and Gabriela Gabriela Cavaglià for this great opportunity to exchange experience and ideas. I very much enjoyed the event and, as expected, had a great time in lovely Torino.

A tribute to John Urry

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JohnIt is difficult to find words to express how shocked and deeply saddened I was with John’s early passing. I have worked with John for the past two years on a research project on climate change that he led with so much enthusiasm and interest. One of his ‘obsessions’, he would say.

Being a linguist by background, I was not familiar with his work when we first started this project but it did not take long for me to be happily immersed in his books and develop full admiration for his work. John opened up my horizons and has changed the way I see society and language. Genuinely modest, he was always kind, supportive, full of ideas and insightful comments that made me think and work hard. I have learned so much from him.

I will always keep a special memory of our last meeting. I asked him how he would explain some ups and downs in the frequency of the word energy in our newspaper data. He just turned to me and said: ‘We will have to examine the collocations of energy’. I was so glad to hear that and I could not help having a good laugh. He added: ‘Is collocation the wrong word?’.  ‘No John, but you sound like a corpus linguist’.

I feel very much privileged to have had the chance to work with such a brilliant mind. John was a very special person and will be greatly missed.

Corpus compilation: working paper now available

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We are pleased to announce that the CASS Corpus on Urban Violence in Brazil is now ready to be analysed. It contains a total of about 5,127 articles (1,778,282 words) published between Jan-Dec 2014 by four Brazilian newspapers: Folha de São Paulo, Estado de São Paulo, Zero Hora and Pioneiro.

This working paper explains the process of compiling the corpus. It describes the selection of sources and individual texts, preparation of the texts so that they can be processed by corpus linguistics techniques, and concludes with an overview of the corpus’ content.

Changing Climates and the Media: Lancaster workshop

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climate change workshopThe Lancaster workshop on Changing Climates and the Media took place last Monday (21st Sep 2015).  This was a joint event organised by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University.

The workshop brought together leading academics from a wide range of disciplines – sociology, media studies, political and environmental sciences, psychology, and linguistics – as well as community experts from the Environment Agency and the Green Alliance. The result was a lively debate on the interaction between the news media and the British society, and a critical reflection on people’s perception of the problem and effective ways to communicate the issue and promote changes in behaviour and practices.

Professor John Urry from Lancaster University opened the event with a brief overview of the major challenges posed by climate change. He also introduced the CASS project on Changing Climates, a corpus-based research on how climate change issues have been debated in the British and Brazilian news media in the past decade. This contrastive analysis is interesting for various reasons. These include striking differences related to public perception of the problem. While climate-change scepticism is prominent within the public debate in Britain, Brazil is a leading country in terms of concern about climate change, with nine-in-ten Brazilians considering global warming a very serious problem. Dr Carmen Dayrell presented some examples of fundamental differences between the media debate in these two countries. Unlike the British press, Brazilian newspapers articulate the discourse along the same lines as those advocated by the IPCC. This includes stressing the position of developed and developing nations and the projected consequences of the impact of climate change on the Earth’s system, such as the melting of polar icefields, loss of biodiversity and increased frequency of extreme weather events.

The Changing Climates project is currently being extended to Germany and Italy. Dr Marcus Müller from the Technische Universität Darmstadt discussed his preliminary findings on how the German news media has represented climate change issues. Dr M. Cristina Caimotto and Dr Osman Arrobbio from the University of Turin presented their initial observations of the Italian context and data. The Changing Climates presentation concluded with insightful comments by Dr Glenn Watts, the Environment Agency’s research lead on climate change and resource use and Lancaster’s primary partner in the Changing Climates project.

The afternoon session explored climate change from various perspectives. It started with Professor Reiner Grundmann from University of Nottingham who presented corpus research on the media coverage of climate change across Britain, Germany, France and the US. Dr James Painter from the University of Oxford and Dr Neil Gavin from the University of Liverpool focused on the coverage of the UN IPCC reports in the news media and television respectively.

The focus then turned to the British parliament and the 2009 debate on the Climate Change Bill. How do politicians talk about climate change in public? This question was addressed by Rebecca Willis, a PhD candidate at Lancaster University and a member of the Green Alliance. Following that, Dr Neil Simcock, also from Lancaster University, explored the representations of ‘essential’ energy use in the UK media. The session concluded with Professor Alison Anderson from Plymouth University’s talk on the role of local news media in communicating climate change issues.

Our sincere thanks to all participants of the Lancaster workshop for making it a unique and very special event. This was an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas and share experiences which we hope will foster enhanced collaboration between the various disciplines.

 

Changing Climates and the Media

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The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and the Department of Sociology are pleased to announce a one-day symposium on Changing Climates and the Media taking place at Lancaster University on 21st Sep 2015.

This is the end-of-grant event of the CASS project on Changing Climates. The symposium will bring together leading academics from various disciplines, community experts and the Environment Agency in a unique event to discuss recent research on climate change and the media from a wide range of perspectives. Presentations will cover various countries, including Brazil, UK, Germany and Italy. Click here to see details of the programme.

We are all looking forward very much to this event.

CASS Corpus Linguistics workshop at the University of Caxias do Sul (UCS, Brazil)

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Last month at UCS (Brazil), the CASS Corpus Linguistics workshop found a receptive audience who participated actively and enthusiastically engaged in the discussion. The workshop was run from 27-28 May by CASS members Elena Semino, Vaclav Brezina and Carmen Dayrell, and perfectly organised by the local committee Heloísa Feltes and Ana Pelosi.

Organizers

From left to right: Carmen Dayrell, Heloísa Feltes, Vaclav Brezina, Elena Semino, and Ana Pelosi

This workshop brought together lecturers, researchers, PhDs and MA research students from various Brazilian universities. It was a positive, invigorating experience for the CASS team and a golden opportunity to discuss the various applications of corpus linguistics methods. We would like to thank UCS for offering all necessary conditions to make this workshop run so smoothly.

The workshop was part of a collaborative project between UK and Brazilian scholars funded by the UK’s ESRC and the Brazilian research agency CONFAP (FAPERGS) which will make use of corpus linguistics techniques to investigate the linguistic representation of urban violence in Brazil. Further details of this project can be found at https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/?page_id=1501.

Big data media analysis and the representation of urban violence in Brazil: Kick-off meeting

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urbanviolencemeeting

The first meeting of the project took place earlier this month at CASS, Lancaster. This kick-off meeting brought together the Brazilian researchers Professors Heloísa Pedroso de Moraes Feltes (UCS) and Ana Cristina Pelosi (UNISC/UFC) and the CASS team (Professors Elena Semino and Tony McEnery, and Dr Carmen Dayrell) to plan the project’s activities and discuss the next steps.

The meeting was an excellent opportunity to discuss the partners’ role and activities in the project and to clarify how CASS can provide the Brazilian researchers with the expertise needed in a corpus investigation. A key decision towards this goal was to run a two-day Workshop in Corpus Linguistics in Brazil. This will be run by the CASS team (also counting with the expertise of Dr Vaclav Brezina) in the last week of May.

The workshop aims to reach a wider audience and not only to the Brazilian researchers’ team. It will be open to their colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students, and anyone interested in learning and using corpus linguistics methods and tools in the research.

We are all looking forward to that!

Welcoming the new members of the Climate Change team

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We are delighted to announce that Dr. Marcus Müller from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto from the University of Torino (Italy) have kindly agreed to join CASS Changing Climate project, led by Professor John Urry.

They both will have a lot to contribute to the project. Their experience and language skills will allow us to broaden the project’s scope and also examine the discourses around climate change issues in German and Italian newspapers.

Dr. Marcus Müller is a senior lecturer in German linguistics at the Department of German in the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is also an associate member of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) and a teaching fellow of the Heidelberg Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Paderborn and Düsseldorf as well as at the universities of Tashkent, Budapest and Beijing. Dr. Marcus Müller is the founder and spokesman for the German-Chinese graduate network “Sprachkulturen – Fachkulturen” and the “Language and Knowledge” Graduate Platform (http://en.sprache-und-wissen.de/). His research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, grammatical variation, language and social roles, language and art. You can find more about him at http://www.gs.uni-heidelberg.de/sprache02/mitarbeiter/mueller/index.html

Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto is research fellow in English Language and Translation at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Torino. She is also a member of the Environmental Humanities International Research Group. Her research interests include translation studies, political discourse and environmental discourse. In her work, the contrastive analysis of texts in different languages (translated or comparable) is employed as a tool for critical discourse analysis.

New working paper on “Changing Climate and Society: The Surprising Case of Brazil” now available

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Why is Brazil unique when it comes to climate change? Brazil is a major emerging economy and it is the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. However, its fossil fuel-based emissions are low by global standards. Brazil has been innovative in developing some relevant low carbon ways of generating energy and pioneered significant transport innovations. It has also played a major role in international debates on global warming and Brazilians’ degree of concern about global warming is higher than almost anywhere else. Brazil has the largest reserve of agricultural land in the world and it houses most of the Amazon forest and river basin.

climatechangeworkingThis working paper examines the interesting case of Brazil, offering a general overview of the centrality of Brazil within climate policy and politics.

Download and read the complimentary working paper now.