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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…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 2: Getting Started
training: MASS VERB: The action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behaviour. So how to begin? With experts as our guides (and thankfully no animals in sight!)… The Context: The first week was to be dedicated to training. We began by watching a short video clip of a Trinity examination in…
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Reflections from the CASS student challenge panel member, part 3
Pamela Irwin, this year’s CASS student challenge panel member, is looking back on her past year of research. This is part 3 of her reflections — need to catch up on the others? Click here to read part 1, or here to read part 2. Lately, I have been examining sociolinguistics and its related sub-disciplines as part of…
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Reflections from the CASS student challenge panel member, part 2
Pamela Irwin, this year’s CASS student challenge panel member, is looking back on her past year of research. This is part 2 of her reflections — did you miss part 1? Click here to catch up. As my research is predicated on a realist ontology, I have been concerned that it is at odds with…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 1: Our Approach
To Transcribe: VERB: to put (thoughts, speech, or data) into written or printed form origin: mid 16th century (in the sense ‘make a copy in writing’): from Latin transcribere, from trans- ‘across’ + scribere ‘write’ In September 2013 we applied for the post of Audio Transcriber in the CASS Office in the Department of Linguistics…
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Reflections from the CASS student challenge panel member, part 1
Each year, one student from an outside institution is appointed to ‘challenge‘ CASS with concepts from their own novel research. Pamela Irwin, the 2013/2014 student challenge panel member, is beginning to wrap up her ‘term’, and has put together a series of reflections on the process. Read the first entry below. I am a mature…
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Log Ratio – an informal introduction
In the latest version of CQPweb (v 3.1.7) a new statistic for keywords, collocations and lockwords is introduced, called Log Ratio. “Log Ratio” is actually my own made-up abbreviated title for something which is more precisely defined as either the binary log of the ratio of relative frequencies or the binary log of the relative…
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Dispatch from YLMP2014
I recently had the pleasure of travelling to Poland to attend the Young Linguists’ Meeting in Poznań (YLMP), a congress for young linguists who are interested in interdisciplinary research and stepping beyond the realm of traditional linguistic study. Hosted over three days by the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, the congress featured over…
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How to be a PhD student (by someone who just was), Part 2: Managing your work and working relationships
After submitting and successfully defending my thesis a few months ago, I’ve decided to share some ‘lessons learnt’ over the course of my 38 months as a PhD student. In Part 2 of this series, I’ll talk about best practices for structuring your work, managing your relationship with your supervisor, and my experience with teaching…
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.