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New CASS Briefing now available — The EDL: moving right-wing populism online in the UK
The 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…
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A Journey into Transcription, Part 3: Clarity
As audio transcribers we listen to sound. Of primary importance is the clarity of the sound. clarity: ABSTRACT NOUN: The quality of being clear (‘easy to perceive, understand, or interpret’), in particular: The quality of being coherent and intelligible The quality of being easy to hear; sharpness of sound The quality of purity Let’s consider…
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Welcome our new CASS postgraduate students!
Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming four new postgraduate students to the centre. Abi, Jennifer, Róisín, and Gillian have now joined last year’s postgraduates Robbie and Amelia in our ever-livelier corridors. These four represent a great range of interests (both academic and personal), and their research promises to be very exciting indeed. Introducing our new postgrads, in their…
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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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Sweepyface: a linguistic profile
This morning brought news of the suicide of a media-branded ‘troll’[1]. Brenda Leyland, the 63 year-old woman behind the @sweepyface Twitter account, a self-proclaimed “researcher” and “anti-McCann” advocate was found dead at a Marriott hotel on Saturday 4th October in Leicester. She was recently contacted by a reporter at Sky News regarding her Twitter activity…
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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…
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.