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Gypsies, tramps and thieves? UK national newspaper depictions of Romanians and Bulgarians analysed
British tabloid newspapers repeatedly associated Romanians – but not Bulgarians – with criminality and anti-social behavior during 2012-2013, a comprehensive new “big data” report by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory shows. The report Bulgarians and Romanians in the British national press was undertaken by CASS Challenge Panel Member William Allen and Dora-Olivia Vicol at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University.…
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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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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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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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Two plead guilty over Twitter rape threats
Trial Tuesday 7th January saw John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley plead guilty to sending messages “menacing” in nature to Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy via multiple Twitter accounts. In July 2013, Criado-Perez had been successful in campaigning for author Jane Austen to appear on the £10 bank note. Shortly after in…
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.