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Brainstorming the Future of Corpus Tools
Since arriving at the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), I’ve been thinking a lot about corpus tools. As I wrote in my blog entry of June 3, I have been working on various software programs to help corpus linguists process and analyse texts, including VariAnt, SarAnt, TagAnt. Since then, I’ve also updated…
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The Scottish referendum – did it unite the Guardian and the Mail?
The Guardian and the Mail are very different newspapers. The Guardian is a left-leaning liberal broadsheet while the Mail is a more popular right-leaning ‘middle-market’ newspaper. Generally, they can be relied on to disagree with one another on a range of social, economic and political issues. However, both newspapers supported the recent “No” campaign during…
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Swimming in the deep end of the Spoken BNC2014 media frenzy
As someone who enjoys acting in his spare time, I’m rarely afraid of the chance spend some time in the spotlight. But as I sat one morning a few weeks ago in my bedroom, in nothing but a dressing gown, about to do a live interview on a national Irish radio station, with no kind…
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Notes from the SILK Road International Summer School
In July 2014, I and four other students from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Lancaster University (Sophie Barker, James Lester, Eleanor Richards-Johnson, and Gillian Smith) travelled to Hong Kong to attend the SILK Road International Summer School. The three week summer school, organised by Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), in affiliation…
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The Spoken BNC2014 project features in the Daily Mail
The recently announced collaboration between Cambridge University Press and CASS, the Spoken BNC2014 project, has made headlines in the Daily Mail. The article, entitled, “No longer marvellous – now we’re all awesome: Britons are using more American words because traditional English is in decline”, describes the preliminary findings of the project, which is in its…
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In memory: Professor Geoffrey Leech
It is with great sorrow that we report the death on 19th August of Professor Geoffrey Leech. Geoff was not only the founder of the UCREL research centre for corpus linguistics at Lancaster University, he was also the first Professor and founding Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language. His contributions to linguistics –…
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Gypsies, tramps and thieves? UK national newspaper depictions of Romanians and Bulgarians analysed
British tabloid newspapers repeatedly associated Romanians – but not Bulgarians – with criminality and anti-social behavior during 2012-2013, a comprehensive new “big data” report by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory shows. The report Bulgarians and Romanians in the British national press was undertaken by CASS Challenge Panel Member William Allen and Dora-Olivia Vicol at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University.…
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How to be a PhD student (by someone who just was), Part 3: Towards the viva
After successfully defending my viva early this year, I’ve been sharing some of the lessons I learned over my 38 months as a PhD student. In this installment, I talk about powering through your final year and preparing for your viva. If you missed the previous entries, click through to read Part 1 (Preparing for the…
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New working paper on “Changing Climate and Society: The Surprising Case of Brazil” now available
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…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.