CHIMED-3: The third International Conference on Historical Medical Discourse

Photo credit: Niall Curry

On two (mostly) sunny May days last week, CHIMED-3, the third International Conference on Historical Medical Discourse was held at the beautiful and very apt location of Mary Ward House, in London. Built in 1898, the building has housed a great many initiatives to support education, community, health, wellbeing and the arts, heritage and science, making it the perfect place for this year’s meeting.

Threading throughout the two days was the issue of narrative. Questions included: who is telling the narrative, and who for? How do narrative strategies change and adapt to different cultural contexts and purposes? How can different datasets be combined to tell a more comprehensive story?

Beginning the day was a fascinating talk by Irma Taavitsainen on Medical Narratives (1375-1800), which explored how medical narrative forms and functions change over time and relate to specific genres and scientific thought styles. We were then treated to four talks that gave us a great insight into women’s recipe collections, through which a range of women shared their medical knowledge. We learnt that pages could be left free at the end of each chapter so that the new owners could add their own thoughts and recipes – wouldn’t that be a nice practice to bring back? Laura Esteban-Segura discussed a recipe manuscript from 1606 that appears to have been a wedding present to Alethea Howard, the countess of Arundel, and Isabel de la Cruz-Cabanillas moved the conference focus towards Late Modern English by exploring interpersonal communication in women’s recipe collections. Prepping us well for the lunch you see below, Francisco Alonso Almeida explored links between remedies and food via medical recipes in 19th century cookery books authored by women. Giulia Rovelli then spoke about Medical Knowledge in Late Modern English Household Recipe Books, which contained our personal favourite word of the day: “chururgeon” (surgeon).

Lunch! Photo credit: Hanna Schmueck

Once we’d sampled what good proper nourishment can do, Elena Semino and Derek Gatherer represented the QuoVaDis team with a fantastic plenary on the Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis). The team is keen to make this corpus publicly available, so watch this space…

The final panel of the day featured Elisabetta Lonati’s talk on 18th-century midwifery, with our favourite quote of the day: “That which principally enobles any science, is the dignity of its object, and the public utility arising from it”. We then took a fascinating detour via a presentation by Anupama Shukla on different portrayals of people with epilepsy in literature (plenty of good Dostojewski content here!) before returning to the topic of midwifery in Richard J. Whitt’s talk dramatic tour of some quite explicit language emerging from a textual exchange within the 18th century controversy surrounding man-midwifery and the use of instruments. 

A screenshot of a quote in Richard J. Whitt’s presentation.

Georg Marko opened Day 2 with his excellent presentation on depersonalisation in medical writing (1700-1900), followed by Daniela Marrone guiding us through various topics emerging from Thomas Linacre’s Medical writing. Katrin Menzel concluded the panel by investigating adjective noun constructions in texts from microbe hunters (what a name) in 19th century Royal Society publications. A pleasure to see some stereotypically tongue-twister-y German compounding in this talk!

Following a quick coffee break, Anna Anselmo took us on a journey into the fascinating realm of Dormatology with her talk on Somnambulism in Medical Dictionaries. We then took a conceptual turn, with Anna La Torre guiding us through eugenics and racial medical discourse in scientific journals during Fascism in Italy, which generated important discussion surrounding how science can both reflect and shape social beliefs and actions. Taking us down another interesting path, Theresa Roth and Gohar Schnelle then presented on different evidential strategies that can be observed in ancient versus early modern medical discourse.

In our second plenary, Carla Suhr introduced us to the history of Daffy’s Elixir Salutis and its legitimisation in pamphlets & newspaper adverts. It was particularly interesting to explore this knowing that we were sat not far from where the elixirs would have been produced and sold back in the day. To conclude the conference, we journeyed from the UK to a completely different part of the world: Australia. Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Alan H. Brook and Angela Gurr presented health logs of the voyage (made by the Surgeon Superintendent, whose reputation and pay notably relied on good reports!) alongside multidisciplinary sources documenting the health of early migrant settlers in South Australia, including news reports and teeth. The advertised ‘life of emigration’ for working class people, in which the boat appears to be a luxury cruise liner and sheep lie down to be sheered, provided a marked contrast to the written and archaeological records of migrants’ experiences…

As you can see, this was a varied and interdisciplinary conference filled with fascinating explorations of medical discourses in different times and contexts. While strategies and contexts change, the purposes of educating and persuading (sometimes both) do not, and looking backwards provides important perspective on modern-day medical discourses, including issues surrounding depersonalised versus holistic approaches, vaccine hesitancy and stigma.

Thanks to everyone who attended CHIMED-3, be it virtually or live at Mary Ward House, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did! If you couldn’t attend or would like to rewatch some of the talks, please feel free to take a look at the recordings here.

You can also follow the event on Twitter using the hashtag #CHIMED3.

‘Collaborations between Linguistics and the Professions’ event – Three participants’ views

On 4th-6th March 2019, we organised an event on ‘Collaborations between Linguistics and the Professions’. If you missed it, here are three reports from early-career researchers – one for each day.

Day One – by Mathew Gillings

The aim and focus of the Collaborations between Linguistics and the Professions event was to look at connections and opportunities that arise between the academic discipline of linguistics and wider industry. Broadly speaking, the event considered how university-based linguists may be able to advise in both the public and private sectors, providing consultancy to help inform real-world issues. As a PhD student applying corpus methods to the study of deceptive language, the first day of the three-day event was of particular interest to me, due to its focus on forensic linguistics and public engagement.

After a quick welcome and opening of the event from Elena Semino, we started with a talk by Louise Mullany. Louise works at the University of Nottingham, but also carries out linguistic consultancy through the Linguistic Profiling for Professionals unit she directs. Louise discussed how her team has worked within a whole range of sectors and applied linguistic theory to help inform their practice. For example, politeness theory might well provide the answers to why one firm is struggling with their customer service; or perhaps an investigation into gendered talk might reveal some underlying problems or tensions. Perhaps even other methods could provide further insight, such as eye-tracking, or putting clients through an online learning course. Louise’s talk gave a good insight into how such a unit operates.

The second talk built on the first one, with Isobelle Clarke showing us not only what you need to think about and be aware of, but also what you shouldn’t do when trying to build a reputation as a linguistic consultant. Although Isobelle has already had some good opportunities through the connections made throughout her PhD, she argued that her reputation will always be questioned for the stereotypes that come with the territory. For example: she is female, unlike most forensic linguistic consultants; she is from Essex, and therefore has an accent that is often prejudiced against; and she is also still early-career. These are things she cannot change, but still unfortunately affect whether or not she is considered credible as an expert in the field. It was good to hear such an open and frank discussion about inequalities within the field.

Continuing with the forensic linguistics theme, Georgina Brown offered an insight into how new methodologies within forensic speech science are now being used to inform proceedings within the courtroom. Georgina introduced us to Soundscape Voice Evidence, a new start-up based right here in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster, which is all the proof you need that there is a real appetite for further collaboration between academia and industry.

Another interesting talk later that day was by Lancaster’s very own Claire Hardaker, who talked about learning when to say ‘no’ to opportunities that come your way. Claire discussed several cases where, due to her own excitement, she may have jumped into a new opportunity too quickly. As a PhD student, it was good to hear advice on how to handle different cases, and especially on how to be careful in picking which cases to pursue. Likewise, this seemed to be a common theme over the three days, with a whole range of attendees discussing issues they had encountered whilst carrying out this kind of collaborative work.

The day came to a close with Tony McEnery’s talk discussing linguistics and the impact agenda. Tony reflected on some of his own experiences working with various agencies outside of academia, but the bulk of his talk concerned impact work against the backdrop of the REF. Tony gave some top tips for how to get your research out there and informing public life through the Civil Service, but also spoke very realistically about the priority it will be given by others. Everyone is busy – those in academia and those outside of it – and we must not lose sight of that. Tony finished with a call to arms: language pervades each and every aspect of our life, and it is clear that the discipline has a lot more to offer than it has traditionally done in the past.

Day one of the Collaborations between Linguistics and the Professions event was enlightening. I, for one, never knew quite how much consultancy work linguists are involved with, and it was refreshing to see such a healthy appetite for it within the room – especially from early-career researchers, like myself, who may well do it in the future.

Day 2 – by Sundeep Dhillon

I attended the education focused sessions on Tuesday, given that my background is in English language teaching and, as a current ESRC doctoral student in Applied Linguistics, I was keen to find out more on collaborations between linguistics and the professions. The day started with a warm welcome from Elena Semino prior to the first presentation. Alison Mackey spoke about her work as a linguistics consultant in the private sector which ranged from educational technology companies to private schools in the USA. Alison gave lots of varied (and humorous) examples of the consultancy work and how she achieved these contracts, which she traced back to three key factors. These were networking and word of mouth referrals, the publication of a book on bilingualism by Harper Collins, and a Guardian article which has over 65,000 shares on Facebook. I was impressed by the range of Alison’s work activities, proving that linguistics can be widely applied to real-life practical contexts.

One of the schools Alison has worked with in the USA, ‘Avenues: The World School’, was then represented by Abby Brody. The private school has an innovative approach to teaching as students are immersed in Spanish or Mandarin (alongside English) with the aim of becoming ‘truly fluent’. The links between linguistics and the school’s curriculum development over time were outlined. It was clear that the school was responsive to research and adapted their teaching and learning practices accordingly.

The next presentation by Judit Kormos was very inspiring in that the linguistics research has led to a direct impact on the way inclusive practices are promoted in educational publishing and second language assessment. Judit’s research on specific learning difficulties and L2 learning difficulties has aimed to give a voice and agency to those who are traditionally underrepresented. There were a number of examples given of working with publishers and government departments to develop strategies and ways of working which are inclusive. The success of Lancaster’s Future Learn MOOC  on Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching was also discussed and there is now an opportunity to join the next launch of this MOOC on the 15th April 2019.

Following a lovely long and well catered lunch break, we then heard from Claire Dembry of Cambridge University Press (CUP). Claire outlined the many opportunities for links between the publisher and academic research, including the recent Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC) project in collaboration with Lancaster University. This project involved collecting 11.5 million words of spoken conversation and the BNC 2014 is now available online with free access. There are also opportunities to contribute to articles, books, research guides and white papers which are produced by CUP. Claire also answered questions on practical considerations such as contacting CUP, pitching ideas and negotiating fees, all of which was useful information to consider prior to any collaboration.

We then heard from Vaclav Brezina about corpora and language teaching and learning. There were three main sections in the presentation – accessibility, research partnerships and interdisciplinarity. Accessibility covered the link between theoretical ideas of linguistics and the practical tools and techniques used in projects such as the BNCLab and #LancsBox. Research partnership highlighted the importance of collaboration with others such as CUP and Trinity College London. Finally, interdisciplinarity covered good practice guidelines on working with others including flexibility and collective ownership of goals.

Cathy Taylor of Trinity College London presented about ‘The Spoken Learner Corpus’ (SLC) project collaboratively undertaken by Trinity College London and CASS, Lancaster University. This has involved collecting data from Trinity’s spoken Graded Examinations in Spoken English (GESE) at B1 level and above, leading to the creation of the SLC which can be explored for language teaching and research purposes. Cathy described the stages of the project including the rationale, the practical data collection of audio recorded exams from GESE and also the creation of teaching and learning materials based on the SLC. These materials are available on the Trinity website and cover topics such as managing hesitation and asking questions. This project is a great example of how corpus data can be used to inform and improve the classroom experience of English language learners.

The final presentation was by John Pill, who spoke about his experience of updating the Occupational English Test (OET), an English language test for medical professionals. Collaboration between the test developers, language researchers and medical experts was outlined, including tensions between them in relation to the expected content, assessment criteria and outcomes of the OET. Overall, the process to create a relevant language test which covered English language and also practical medical aspects was successful with an updated test being launched following the collaboration.

Each of the presentations linked the research within linguistics to applications in the wider education profession. There was a lot of useful information and plenty of food for thought for the audience in considering future collaboration activities.

Day 3 – by Joelle Loew

It is the third day of the conference – by now a familiar crowd is coming together around coffee in the morning, and the atmosphere is at ease. People have come from all over the UK and beyond to the beautiful campus of Lancaster University – I had flown in from Switzerland a while ago, where I am doing my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Basel. Everyone is looking forward to the last day, which brings together researchers and practitioners applying linguistics in various professions including media and marketing. We start off with a talk from Colleen Cotter from Queen Mary University of London on bridging ‘the professional divide’ between journalists’ and academics’ talk about language – she outlines journalistic language ideologies but also highlights journalistic audience design and corresponding readership-orientation as an example of how journalistic practice can feed into academic practice. After a quick refill, we gather again to hear Lancaster’s own Veronika Koller discuss her experience of opportunities and obstacles in linguistics consulting in healthcare. Throughout the presentation she refers to and outlines the main stakeholders in healthcare particularly relevant to linguistics:

https://twitter.com/ZsofiaDemjen/status/1103251411268182016

On we then go to hear Jeannette Littlemore from the University of Birmingham discuss her work with marketing and communications agencies on their use of figurative messaging. She focuses on the role of metaphor and metonymy for brand recognition, brand recall and consumer preference, drawing on examples from her research and work with the creative industry. Discussions following her talk continue into the lunch break, refreshed and well fed we move into an afternoon packed with insight from industry. Gill Ereaut brings in the perspective of a linguist working within the professions, introducing her consultancy Linguistic Landscapes. Their work includes evidence-based consulting for organisations on multiple levels, including organisational culture change. Another perspective from industry follows by Sandra Pickering from opento, who talks about the role of language in marketing. She provides a wide array of fascinating examples from her diverse experience with different organisations, and spends some time outlining how brands become metaphorical persons on their quest to build compelling brand narratives. The audience discusses some well-known brand narratives and archetypes of smaller and bigger players in the industry following her talk.

https://twitter.com/VeronikaKoller/status/1103306088953331713

Dan McIntyre and Hazel Price from the University of Huddersfield then present two very different case studies applying corpus linguistics in a private and a public setting with their consultancy Language Unlocked. The day ends with a Skype talk by Deborah Tannen from Georgetown University who captures the audience with her account on why and how she writes for non-academic audiences. Her multiple and diverse experiences of writing for the broader public make for interesting insights on the differences in writing for academics and writing for a lay audience. She emphasizes the value of having to find simple terminology for expressing and simplifying complicated ideas. Her talk was followed by a lively discussion, as were the others in the day. Exploring opportunities and challenges in linguistic consultancy work through discussing hands-on examples from different perspectives allowed highlighting recurrent themes too, such as the importance of considering ethical aspects in this process. It also showed the tremendous potential and relevance of linguistics for a variety of different aspects of the professional world.

In sum, it was a fascinating day and a very inspiring conference overall – throughout the day it was evident that attendees genuinely felt the exchange between academics and practitioners applying linguistics in the professional world was very fruitful, and I am almost certain it is not the last we’ve heard of events such as this! It certainly broadened my own horizon as a PhD researcher looking at professional communication – showing many opportunities and highlighting the challenges to prepare for and navigate when seeking collaboration between linguistics and the professions.

CASS in the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science

The ESRC Festival of Social Science is an annual celebration of social science research – comprised of a huge array of public events of all kinds, and designed to promote awareness of UK social science research across the board. This year, it runs from 4th to 11th November.

As the team at ESRC says,

“You may be surprised at just how relevant the Festival’s events are to society today. Social science research makes a difference. Discover how it shapes public policy and contributes to making the economy more competitive, as well as giving people a better understanding of 21st century society. From big ideas to the most detailed observations, social science affects us all everyday – at work, in school, when raising children, within our communities, and even at the national level.”

As an ESRC Centre, CASS has been involved in the Festival since our work began in 2013. We have organised events of different types in different years – for instance, in the first year of the Centre, our contribution to the Festival was a series of talks in schools in the North West of English to introduce the kind of social science analysis in which we specialise to students in sixth-form. It was great to be able to reach out to an audience that we rarely have a chance to communicate with about our work.

In subsequent years, we organised events under our “Valuing language” banner – aimed at using examples of our work to present to a public audience the benefits across the social sciences that arise in research that understands the value of language for all kinds of social investigations. Our first “Valuing language” event was in London; the following year we held another event in Manchester.

This year our contribution to the Festival of Social Science is a new “Valuing language” presentation. This event focuses in particular on two strands of research that have been under way in CASS for the past two years or so, looking at the intersection of language with the critical issue of health and healthcare. We are also returning to London for the event, entitled “Valuing language: Effective communication in healthcare provision”. The event – at 6.30 pm on Thursday 9th November – is particularly aimed at healthcare practitioners and those training to enter healthcare services – but of course, it is open to anyone with an interest in this work!

The evening will include two presentations, one on each of these strands of work. First will be a presentation of research into patient comments on healthcare services collected through the NHS Choices website. Patient feedback has often been analysed by looking straightforwardly at the numeric ratings given in feedback. However, the textual responses supplied alongside these ratings are a far richer source of data – albeit so extensive they can be non-straightforward to analyse! But this is, of course, where corpus-based linguistic methods come in. A CASS project, led by Paul Baker, has applied these methods to investigate patients place on interpersonal skills and effective, compassionate communication. Two members of the team working on this project, myself and Craig Evans, will give an overview of how we have gone about analysing this unique and fascinating source of data.

In the second half of the event, CASS Director Elena Semino will present her work looking at patients’ reporting of pain. A common way for healthcare practitioners to assess the level of pain that patients are experiencing is to use questionnaires that present descriptor  words – such as “pricking/boring/drilling/stabbing”. The descriptor word that a patient chooses is assumed to reflect the level of their pain. Elena’s research suggests, however, that patients’ choice of descriptor may in many cases instead be a result of how strongly associated with the word “pain” the descriptor word is. Again, this is a problem that corpus-based language analysis is an ideal way to address. Elena will explain the findings of her investigation and also consider the implications these findings have for how descriptor-word questionnaires should be used in assessing patients’ pain.

We’re all looking forward to participating once again in the ESRC Festival and we hope to see you there!

Find out more (and sign up for the event) via https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/festival17.

User Involvement: CASS go to CLARIN PLUS workshop

At the beginning of June, I attended the CLARIN PLUS workshop on User Involvement held in the capital Helsinki. CLARIN stands for “Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure”; it is an international research infrastructure which provides scholars in the social sciences and humanities with easy access to digital language data, and also advanced tools to handle those data sets. The main purpose of the workshop was to share information, good practice, expertise, and ideas on how potential and current users can most benefit from CLARIN services.

I was representing Lancaster University as part of the UK branch of CLARIN, which is led by Martin Wynne at Oxford. Some of the participants, representing CLARIN’s different national consortia, shared their successful stories of their involvement with the local community.

At the workshop, Johanna Berg, from Sweden, and Mietta Lennes, from Finland showed us how they made innovative use of the roadshow event format to present some language resources across different institutions in their countries. Mietta also gave us a taste of the very useful tools and corpora that you can find at The Language Bank of Finland.

Another fruitful example presented at the workshop was the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathons. The event, which is in its third edition, brings together researchers from computer science, humanities and social sciences for a week of intensive work sharing a diversity of skills. Eetu Mäkelä, one of the organisers of the DHH, demonstrated that it is possible to engage researchers from very different backgrounds and have them working in a complementary way. The impressive results of last year’s edition can be checked out at the DHH16 website.

At the end of two profitable days, Darja Fišer, director of CLARIN-ERIC User Involvement, wrapped up the event by presenting other amazing experiences across several institutions connected to CLARIN. One of the success stories she mentioned was the Corpus Linguistics: Method, Analysis, Interpretation MOOC offered by CASS, which will be running again in Autumn this year (you can register your interest here!). Darja also highlighted the importance of events such as summer schools to reach out to more users. Indeed, Darja shared some incredible resources and insightful ideas at our recent Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics and other Digital methods (#LancsSS17). Make sure you read our next blog post for a summary of the summer school week!

Spoken BNC2014 Symposium

On the afternoon of Monday 26th June, CASS hosted a special symposium to celebrate the upcoming public launch of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 – a corpus which members of CASS and Cambridge University Press have spent the last three years compiling.

More than fifty guests attended, representing a mixture of Lancaster Summer Schools participants, members of the CASS Challenge Panel, and those who travelled to Lancaster just for the day.

To kick off the symposium, CASS Centre Director Andrew Hardie said a few words about the history of Corpus Linguistics at Lancaster University, and put the compilation of a new BNC into context against previous developments in the field. He expressed his delight at the interest in the Spoken BNC2014 project as evidenced by the number of guests who were in attendance for the symposium.

I then gave the first talk alongside Claire Dembry (from Cambridge University Press) and Andrew Hardie, as representatives of the Spoken BNC2014 research team which also includes Vaclav Brezina and Tony McEnery. We discussed the main methodological decisions we made when thinking about the design, data collection, transcription and processing of the corpus. Andrew then gave a quick demonstration of the corpus in CQPweb, showing how features including speaker IDs, overlaps and attribution confidence are displayed in the interface.

Following our talk came the first of four research presentations, all of which used (the early access subset of) the Spoken BNC2014. The first of these was a talk by Karin Aijmer (University of Gothenburg) about the intensifier fucking, which went down very well with the audience. Karin’s Spoken BNC2014 research, which also includes other intensifiers, will be published as a chapter in Brezina et al. (forthcoming).

After a short break for refreshments, Jacqueline Laws (University of Reading) presented research into verb-forming suffixation which she had undertaken with Chris Ryder and Sylvia Jaworska. Comparing the demographically-sampled component of the Spoken BNC1994 to the new Spoken BNC2014, she found that females now appear to produce more neologisms (e.g. favouritize, popify) compared to males. Laws et al.’s research will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

Susan Reichelt (Lancaster University) was next to present her work on producing sociolinguistically comparable subsets of both the original and new Spoken British National Corpora. She highlighted a point which I had touched upon in my earlier talk: that the compilation of the Spoken BNC2014 sought to strike a balance between direct comparability with the original corpus on the one hand, and methodological improvement on the other. The areas where improvement was favoured over comparability (e.g. the classification of speaker socio-economic status) ought to be considered especially when thinking about sociolinguistic analysis. Susan’s work is associated with the recently announced CASS SDA project.

Finally, Jonathan Culpeper and Mathew Gillings (Lancaster University) presented their work on politeness variation between the north and south of England. They aimed to assess the extent to which commonly held stereotypes about differences between northern and southern politeness were reflected in language use in both the original and new corpora as a single dataset. Their work will be published as a chapter in Brezina et al. (forthcoming).

My reaction as the organiser of the symposium was that there is definitely a sense of anticipation about the release of the Spoken BNC2014, which is planned to take place in the autumn. Furthermore it was lovely to meet so many friendly and enthusiastic attendees. I am very grateful to each of the speakers for giving such interesting talks, and to all who attended – especially those who tweeted their reactions to the talks using the #BNC2014 hashtag! As one of my final duties as a member of CASS before moving onto pastures new, I am very glad that the symposium went as well as it did.

CASS goes to the Wellcome Trust!

Earlier this month I represented CASS in a workshop, hosted by the Wellcome Trust, which was designed to explore the language surrounding patient data. The remit of this workshop was to report back to the Trust on what might be the best ways to communicate to patients about their data, their rights respecting their data, and issues surrounding privacy and anonymity. The workshop comprised nine participants who all communicated with the public as part of their jobs, including journalists, bloggers, a speech writer, a poet, and a linguist (no prizes for guessing who the latter was…). On a personal note, I had prepared for this event from the perspective of a researcher of health communication. However, the backgrounds of the other participants meant that I realised very quickly that my role in this event would not be so specific, so niche, but was instead much broader, as “the linguist” or even “the academic”.

Our remit was to come up with a vocabulary for communication about patient data that would be easier for patients to understand. As it turned out, this wasn’t too difficult, since most of the language surrounding patient data is waffly at its best, and overly-technical and incomprehensible at its worst. One of the most notable recommendations we made concerned the phrase ‘patient data’ itself, which we thought might carry connotations of science and research, and perhaps disengage the public, and so recommended that the phrase ‘patient health information’ might sound less technical and more 14876085_10154608287875070_1645281813_otransparent. We undertook a series of tasks which ranged from sticking post-it notes on whiteboards and windows, to role play exercises and editing official documents and newspaper articles. What struck me, and what the diversity of these tasks demonstrated particularly well, was how the suitability of our suggested terms could only really be assessed once we took the words off the post-it notes and inserted them into real-life communicative situations, such as medical consultations, patient information leaflets, newspaper articles, and even talk shows.

The most powerful message I took away from the workshop was that close consideration of linguistic choices in the rhetoric surrounding health is vital for health care providers to improve the ways that they communicate with the public. To this end, as a collection of methods that facilitate the analysis of large amounts of authentic language data in and across a variety of texts and contexts, corpus linguistics has an important role to play in providing such knowledge in the future. Corpus linguistic studies of health-related communication are currently small in number, but continue to grow apace. Although the health-related research that is being undertaken within CASS, such as Beyond the Checkbox and Metaphor in End of Life Care, go some way to showcasing the rich fruits that corpus-based studies of health communication can bear, there is still a long way to go. In particular, future projects in this area should strive to engage consumers of health research not only in terms of our findings, but also the (corpus) methods that we have used to get there.

Upcoming CASS Psycholinguistics Seminar

CASS is excited to announce an upcoming half-day research seminar on the theme of “Corpus Data and Psycholinguistics”. The event will take place on Thursday 19th May 2016 at 1-5pm in Furness Lecture Theatre 3.

The aim of the event is to bring together researchers with an interest in combining methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. In particular, there will be a focus on experimental psycholinguistics. It is set to be an exciting afternoon consisting of four 40-minute presentations from both internal and external speakers. Professor Padraic Monaghan from the Department of Psychology will be giving an introduction to computational modelling in psycholinguistics, and I will be presenting my work on investigating the processing of collocation using EEG. Furthermore, Dr Phil Durrant from the University of Exeter will be giving a talk entitled “Revisiting collocational priming”, and Professor Michaela Mahlberg from the University of Birmingham will be discussing the methodological issues associated with combining eye-tracking techniques with corpus data.

You can find out more about these talks from the abstracts below.


Padraic Monaghan, Lancaster University

Computational modelling of corpus data in psycholinguistic studies

Computational models of language learning and processing enable us to determine the inherent structure present in language input, and also the cognitive mechanisms that react to this structure. I will give an introduction to computational models used in psycholinguistic studies, with a particular focus on connectionist models where the structure of processing is derived principally from the structure of the input to the model.


Phil Durrant, University of Exeter

Revisiting collocational priming

Durrant & Doherty (2010) evaluated whether collocations at different levels of frequency exhibit psycholinguistic priming. It also attempted to untangle collocation from the related phenomenon of psychological association by comparing collocations which were and were not associates. Priming was found between high-frequency collocations but associated collocates appeared to exhibit more deep-rooted priming (as reflected in a task designed to reflect automatic, rather than strategic processes) than those which were not associated. This presentation will critically review the 2010 paper in light of more recent work. It will re-evaluate the study itself and suggest ways in which research could be taken forward.

Durrant, P., & Doherty, A. (2010). Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory, 6(2), 125-155.


Jennifer Hughes, Lancaster University

Investigating the processing of collocation using EEG: A pilot study

In this presentation, I discuss the results of an EEG experiment which pilots a procedure for determining whether or not there is a quantitively distinct brain response to the processing of collocational bigrams compared to non-collocational bigrams. Collocational bigrams are defined as adjacent word pairs which have a high forward transitional probability in the BNC (e.g. crucial point), while non-collocational bigrams are defined as adjacent word pairs which are semantically plausible but are absent from the BNC (e.g. crucial night). The results show that there is a neurophysiological difference in how collocational bigrams and non-collocations bigrams are processed.


Michaela Mahlberg, Kathy Conklin, and Gareth Carrol, University of Birmingham

Exploring corpus-attested patterns in Dickens’s fiction – methodological challenges of using eye-tracking techniques

The study of the relationship between patterns and meanings is a key concern in corpus linguistics. The data that corpus linguists work with, however, only provides a partial picture. In this paper, we will look at how questions of frequencies in corpora can be related to questions raised by data from eye-tracking studies on reading times. We will also discuss challenges of designing experiments to address these questions. As a case study, we focus on examples of patterns identified in Dickens’s fiction, but the methodological issues we address have wider implications beyond the study of literary corpora.


The event is free to attend and is open to both internal and external attendees. If you are an external guest, please email j.j.hughes@lancaster.ac.uk so we know that you intend to come.

We are really looking forward to this event as it will be an exciting opportunity to share ideas regarding the different approaches to using corpus data in experimental psycholinguistics.

FireAnt Launch Event

We will be running a launch event and workshop for a new software tool that we have created called FireAnt. The event and workshop will be held from 13:00 to 17:00 on Monday 22nd February 2016 here at Lancaster University.

FireAnt was created by Laurence Anthony as part of the 2015 ESRC-funded CASS-affiliated DOOM project on social media analysis. FireAnt is a free and easy-to-use tool designed to help corpus linguists and social scientists analyze Twitter and other social network data without the need for programming or database management skills. The following features of the tool will be explored in this workshop:

  • import different formats of data (e.g. Twitter data in JSON format, Reddit data in CSV format, etc.)
  • search that data and its associated metadata in a variety of ways (e.g., retrieve all tweets containing #blacklivesmatter sent in December 2015)
  • export the results to other formats including a plain text file for “standard” corpus analysis, an Excel/CSV file for statistical analysis, a timeline chart, and a network graph

We will be providing lunch at the start of the event and all materials for the workshop (including the software and help guide) on a USB drive. The schedule for the day can be found below.

SCHEDULE

Time Agenda
1315-1415 PDR Room: Lunch
1415-1430 Introduction, log on, etc.
1430-1530 FireAnt basics
1530-1545 Refuel: Coffee break
1545-1645 FireAnt advanced
1645-1700 Q&As, requests, bouquets, encores

Please note that places are extremely limited and must be booked in advance. If you would like to attend, please email Claire Hardaker (c.hardaker@lancaster.ac.uk) in the first instance.