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“My research trip to the CASS centre” by visiting PhD student Anna Mattfeldt
Several times a year, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science welcomes visiting researchers, from PhD students to professors. Past visitors include Will Hamlin (Washington State University, USA) and Iuliia Rudych (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany); current visitors include Laurence Anthony (Waseda University, Japan) and Anna Mattfeldt (Heidelberg University, Germany). Before returning to her home university, Anna…
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How to be a PhD student (by someone who just was), Part 1: Preparing for the programme
In December 2013, after three years and two months of work, I submitted my PhD thesis. Last month, I successfully defended it, and made the (typographical) corrections in two nights. I’m a Doctor! It’s still exciting to say. A PhD is certainly not easy — I’ve heard it compared to giving birth, starting and ending…
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Twitter’s reaction to the Benefits Britain live debate
Benefits Street was a series of television programmes broadcast by the Channel 4 outlet between 6th January and 10th February 2014 which, as Channel 4 have claimed, “sparked a national conversation about Britain’s welfare system”. The programme focussed on a community of people living in the economically deprived area of Winson Green, Birmingham and specifically…
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The Twitter reaction to the sentencing of the Lee Rigby murderers – 26th February 2014
by Love, R., McEnery, T. & Wattam, S. Introduction The ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University has undertaken some preliminary research into the immediate reaction on Twitter to the sentencing of the Lee Rigby murderers on Wednesday 26th February 2014. This document summarises our findings. Background On the afternoon…
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Update on Changing Climates
The Changing Climates project is a corpus-based investigation of discourses around climate change. It aims to examine how climate change has been framed in the media coverage across Britain and Brazil in the past decade. Here, we look at two different scenarios. Recent surveys have shown that climate change is currently considered a high priority…
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Using Corpora to Analyze Gender
I wrote UCAG during a sabbatical as a semi-sequel to a book I published in 2006 called Using Corpora for Discourse Analysis. Part of the reason for the second book was to update and expand some of my thinking around discourse- or social-related corpus linguistics. As time has passed, I haven’t become disenamoured of corpus methods,…
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Using version control software for corpus construction
There are two problems that often come up in collaborative efforts towards corpus construction. First, how do two or more people pool their efforts simultaneously on this kind of work – sharing the data as it develops without working at cross-purposes, repeating effort, or ending up with incompatible versions of the corpus? Second, how do…
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Trinity oral test corpus: The first hurdle
At Trinity we are wildly excited – yes, wildly – to finally have our corpus project set up with CASS. It’s a unique opportunity to create a learner corpus of English based on some fairly free flowing L2 language which is not too constrained by the testing context. All Trinity oral tests are recorded and…
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.