Category Archives: CASS Briefing

New CASS Briefing now available – Analysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment

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cassnarrative-briefingAnalysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment. Transparent and effective communication between firms and the investment community is a key determinant of corporate success. Audited financial statements and associated narrative disclosures are among the main methods that firms use to communicate with investors and analysts. These disclosures combine with information from financial journalists and other market commentators to form the Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE). While a considerable body of work exists on financial narratives, research has been limited by the methods used for measuring the characteristics and quality of such disclosures. In particular, the need to hand-collect relevant data from firms’ annual reports and the subjectivity of textual scoring based on manual methods has restricted progress. Recent advances in computational and corpus linguistics provide a basis for undertaking more sophisticated analyses.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS Briefing now available — Hate Speech: Crime against Muslims

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CASSbriefings-hatespeechHate Speech: Crime against Muslims. The notion of ‘hate crime’ might conjure up an image of premeditated violence perpetrated by a bigoted thug. But in reality, a majority of so-called ‘hate crimes’ are committed with little aforethought by very ordinary people in ordinary circumstances and involve a verbal assault rather than physical attack. This briefing provides the key research findings from the project as it provided important groundwork for a CASS research project launched in 2014 on The management of hateful invective by the courts.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS Briefing now available — Language surrounding poverty in early modern England: Constructing seventeenth-century beggars and vagrants

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CASSbriefings-povertyLanguage surrounding poverty in early modern England: Constructing seventeenth-century beggars and vagrants. This briefing concentrates upon attitudes towards a subset of poor people – a group who might today be termed beggars or vagrants. Seventeenth century vagrants were a marginalised group: they were overwhelmingly illiterate and politically powerless. By undertaking a study of them, we hope to improve our understanding of a people who were effectively voiceless in their own time. On a practical level, it is important to understand changing discourses on the poor because legislative change was influenced by changing public perceptions of poverty.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS Briefing now available — A ‘battle’ or a ‘journey’? Metaphors and cancer

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CASSbriefings-melcA ‘battle’ or a ‘journey’? Metaphors and cancer. Metaphors matter because they ‘frame’ topics in different ways, which can affect our perception of ourselves and our experiences. The ‘battle’ metaphor for cancer has become controversial because of the framing it may impose on the patient’s experience; the ‘journey’ metaphor frames the cancer experience very differently. We were particularly concerned with whether and how different metaphors may place the patient in an ‘empowered’ or a ‘disempowered’ position, and with the resulting emotional associations.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS Briefing now available — What words are most useful for learners of English?

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CASSbriefings-EDLWhat words are most useful for learners of English? Introducing the New General Service List. Learning vocabulary is a complex process in which the learner needs to acquire both the form and a variety of meanings of a given vocabulary item. General vocabulary lists can assist in the process of learning words by providing common vocabulary items. In response to problems identified in the currently available General Service List, the authors decided to investigate the core English vocabulary with very large language corpora using current corpus linguistics technology.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS Briefing now available — The EDL: moving right-wing populism online in the UK

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CASSbriefings-EDLThe EDL: moving right-wing populism online in the UK. The English Defence League (EDL) is a far-right populist political movement and campaigns specifically on issues concerning the presence of Muslims and Islam in Western societies. This briefing from CASS presents the results of a corpus study on the online activities of the EDL and its supporters. The briefing shows that, although the hierarchy of the EDL claims to be specifically concerned with radical Islam, the discourse of supporters is less focussed and contains more explicit forms of Islamophobia.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS: Briefing now available — Opposing gay rights in UK Parliament: Then and now

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CASSbriefings-gayrightsOpposing gay rights in UK Parliament: Then and now. How has the expression of opposition to gay rights changed in Parliamentary speeches in recent years? How are discussions of gay people involved in these changes? To what extent could these arguments be seen as homophobic? Read this CASS: Briefing of a diachronic corpus-based discourse analysis to find out more.

New resources are being added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.

New CASS Briefing. Researching online abuse: The case of trolling

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Researching online abuse: the case of trolling. Arguably, the biggest technological advancement in recent times is the internet Sadly, however, the internet also presents new opportunities to act maliciously. Increasingly worrying are offensive behaviours such as trolling and cyberbullying that involve individuals, and sometime whole groups, harassing others, sometimes for no other reason than to entertain themselves. Yet research into this subject is in short supply in the social sciences, in spite of there being a real need for it.

New resources will be added regularly to the new CASS: Briefings tab above, so check back soon.