Changing Climates: Crossing Boundaries

Last Friday (28th), CASS had the pleasure to host a cordial meeting in which researchers from CASS and the University of Bergen got together to discuss about their ongoing research on discourses surrounding climate change.

The Norwegian team runs the NTAP project (Networks of Texts and People) which aims to explore the flow of information across online social networks with a view to understanding how knowledge develops and how opinion is shaped. Among other topics, the project examines the dynamics of discussions in the blogosphere around the various issues related to climate change.

Dag Elgesem and Andrew Salway – the principal investigator and scientific co-ordinator of the NTAP project respectively – provided an overview of the main goals of the project, state of affairs, expectations and their next steps. The Technical consultant and programmer for the project, Knut Hofland, talked about the data and the process of collecting it, describing various issues and decisions made along this process. Lubos Steskal, the project’s post-doctoral fellow, presented an interesting graphical representation of bloggers’ interactions which offers the researcher a clear indication about how communities are formed as well as whether and how they interact with each other. Samia Touileb presented a sample of her ongoing PhD project which uses grammar induction techniques to capture typical expressions used in blogs that discuss climate change.

Tony McEnery and Carmen Dayrell represented the CASS centre. Tony McEnery first provided a general broad view of the centre’s activities and staff by briefly mentioning its various projects. He also talked about some techniques commonly used in corpus-based discourse analysis to extract and manipulate the data. As expected, more attention was paid to the Changing Climates project. Having the climate change sociologist John Urry as its principal investigator, the project aims to contrast how climate change is discussed in news printed media in Britain and Brazil. Carmen Dayrell presented the current stage of the project. Her talk revolved around the composition of the corpora used in this study and a preliminary analysis of the data.

This was an excellent opportunity for these researchers to exchange ideas and experiences, expand horizons and learn about other approaches, perspectives, and views. We hope this first meeting will encourage and foster fruitful enhanced collaboration between these research teams.

Official launch of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science

The official opening of the £4.1 million ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) took place on Tuesday, 23 July 2013, at the start of the seventh international Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference attended by more than 300 delegates. Delegates representing dozens of universities around the world convened with civil servants to honour the past, promote the present, and celebrate the future of corpus methods in the social sciences.

Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke was among several special guests at the launch event including representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Environment Agency. Mr. Clarke said a few words to the audience of scholars and other users of research, stressing the importance of investigating language in the context of society, as well as continuing to foster and nurture interdisciplinary collaborative links in social science research.

With such a large and influential crowd gathered, we took the opportunity to showcase a variety of new and exciting research featuring corpus methods applied to the social sciences to a wide network of people. A range of researchers from Lancaster and much further afield were invited to give poster presentations highlighting their current work, which offers a variety of exciting contributions ranging from methodological advances to increased social understanding, and greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity in academia. Poster presenters included Mike Scott, Alan Partington, Ute Römer, Kevin Harvey, Elena Semino, Veronika Koller, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Alan Partington, Alison Sealey, Andrew Salway, Paul Rayson, Steve Young, Jonathan Culpeper, Paul Baker, Rachelle Vessey, Charlotte Taylor, Anna Marchi, Catherine Chorley, Costas Gabrielatos, and Robbie Love. The posters proved great fodder for stimulating conversation about the future potentials of corpus linguistics and corpus approaches to social science.

Click below to see the full gallery of photos from the evening.