CASS Corpus Linguistics workshop at the University of Caxias do Sul (UCS, Brazil)

Last month at UCS (Brazil), the CASS Corpus Linguistics workshop found a receptive audience who participated actively and enthusiastically engaged in the discussion. The workshop was run from 27-28 May by CASS members Elena Semino, Vaclav Brezina and Carmen Dayrell, and perfectly organised by the local committee Heloísa Feltes and Ana Pelosi.

Organizers

From left to right: Carmen Dayrell, Heloísa Feltes, Vaclav Brezina, Elena Semino, and Ana Pelosi

This workshop brought together lecturers, researchers, PhDs and MA research students from various Brazilian universities. It was a positive, invigorating experience for the CASS team and a golden opportunity to discuss the various applications of corpus linguistics methods. We would like to thank UCS for offering all necessary conditions to make this workshop run so smoothly.

The workshop was part of a collaborative project between UK and Brazilian scholars funded by the UK’s ESRC and the Brazilian research agency CONFAP (FAPERGS) which will make use of corpus linguistics techniques to investigate the linguistic representation of urban violence in Brazil. Further details of this project can be found at https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/?page_id=1501.

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

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.

Big data media analysis and the representation of urban violence in Brazil: Kick-off meeting

urbanviolencemeeting

The first meeting of the project took place earlier this month at CASS, Lancaster. This kick-off meeting brought together the Brazilian researchers Professors Heloísa Pedroso de Moraes Feltes (UCS) and Ana Cristina Pelosi (UNISC/UFC) and the CASS team (Professors Elena Semino and Tony McEnery, and Dr Carmen Dayrell) to plan the project’s activities and discuss the next steps.

The meeting was an excellent opportunity to discuss the partners’ role and activities in the project and to clarify how CASS can provide the Brazilian researchers with the expertise needed in a corpus investigation. A key decision towards this goal was to run a two-day Workshop in Corpus Linguistics in Brazil. This will be run by the CASS team (also counting with the expertise of Dr Vaclav Brezina) in the last week of May.

The workshop aims to reach a wider audience and not only to the Brazilian researchers’ team. It will be open to their colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students, and anyone interested in learning and using corpus linguistics methods and tools in the research.

We are all looking forward to that!

Participate in our ESRC Festival of Social Sciences “Language Matters” event online

We are very pleased like to announce an event that we are live streaming on YouTube and Google+ next week. We hope you can find time to attend online*; if not, the recording will be available on YouTube afterwards.

From 1730 – 1900 GMT on 4 November, the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science is hosting a live event in association with the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences and in tangent with our popular FutureLearn course. We would be thrilled if you could ‘tune in’ and collaborate with us during “Language Matters: Communication, Culture, and Society”.

This evening is a mini-series of four informal talks showcasing the impact of language on society. These are presented by some leading names in corpus linguistics (including the CASS Principal Investigator, Tony McEnery) and their talks draw upon the most popular themes in our corpus MOOC:

– What can corpora tell us about learning a foreign language? (with Vaclav Brezina)
– A ‘battle’, a ‘journey’, or none of these? Metaphors for cancer (with Elena Semino)
– Wolves in the wires: online abuse from people to press (with Claire Hardaker)
– Words ‘yesterday and today’ (with Tony McEnery, Claire Dembry, and Robbie Love)

Though we pride ourselves on bringing interesting, accessible material to people on the go, what really brings these events to life is the interactions that we have with attendees. That’s why we invite you to log in and contribute to the discussions taking place after each presentation.

There are two ways to virtually attend.

First, via Google Hangout if you have a Google account. Sign up at https://plus.google.com/events/ca15afbicmmeiu6d25pn1qbverg and then log in from 17:15 GMT  on 4 November to greet your fellow participants.

If you don’t have a Google account, you can watch us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF_fl95tiSk with no registration.

We’ll be taking questions from the Google Hangout and from the #corpusMOOC hashtag on Twitter (particularly for those viewing on YouTube) and mixing these in with questions from our live audience.

We hope that you can take advantage of this event by participating online.


* If you are available, located in the London area, and would like to attend in person, please visit our event website to register.

‘Language in End-of-Life Care’: A user engagement event

On 8th May 2014, the main findings of the CASS-affiliated project ‘Metaphor in End-of-Life Care’ were presented to potential users of the research at the Work Foundation in central London. The event, entitled ‘Language in End-of-Life Care’ attracted an audience of approximately forty participants, consisting primarily of healthcare professionals and researchers specialising in palliative and end-of-life care. Although most participants are based in the UK, international guests joined us from Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the US.

melc1Professor Sheila Payne (Co-Investigator on the project and Co-Director of Lancaster’s International Observatory on End-of-Life Care), opened proceedings and acted as chair for the day’s activities. Two high-profile invited speakers shared their perspectives on communication in end-of-life care. Professor Lukas Radbruch (Chair of Palliative Medicine, University of Bonn) gave a presentation entitled ‘The search for a final sense of meaning in end-of-life discourses’. Among other things, he emphasized the influence of language and culture on perceptions and attitudes towards end of life and end-of-life care. Professor Dame Barbara Monroe (Chief Executive of St Christopher’s Hospice, London) discussed the main current challenges in hospice care in a talk entitled ‘Listening to patient and professional voices in end-of-life care’. These challenges, she argued, include those posed by a variety of linguistic and communicative barriers.

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The methods, data and findings of the ‘Metaphor in End-of-Life Care’ project were introduced by four members of the team: Professor Elena Semino (Principal Investigator), Dr Veronika Koller (Co-Investigator), Dr Jane Demmen (Research Associate) and Dr Zsófia Demjén (former Research Associate, currently at the Open University). The project involves a combination of ‘manual’ and corpus-based methods to investigate the metaphors used to talk about end-of-life care in a 1.5-million-word corpus consisting of interviews with and online forum posts by terminally ill patients, family carers and health professionals. The team introduced the findings from the analysis that are particularly relevant to practitioners in end-of-life care, namely: the use of ‘violence’ and ‘journey’ metaphors by terminally ill patients, and the narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths told by hospice managers in semi-structured interviews. The implications of these findings for end-of-life care were suggested by the team and discussed with the audience. Participants were also invited to discuss selected uses of metaphors from the health professionals’ data, and to consider the potential value of some creative, alternative metaphors for cancer in particular.

melc3The richness of the interactions on the day and the liveliness of the event’s hashtag on Twitter (#melc14) suggest that the event was a success. In the words of a hospice director: ‘everybody at the conference was truly inspired by the potential for change in practice and training!’ Although the funded phase of the project is coming to an end, the contacts made on the day are likely to lead to further collaborative research between the Lancaster team and healthcare professionals in the UK and beyond.

Elena Semino appears on BBC World Service ‘Healthcheck’

CASS project affiliate (and head of department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University) Elena Semino was interviewed about the findings of the ESRC-funded project ‘Metaphor in End-of-Life Care’ on the BBC World Service’s programme ‘Healthcheck’, presented by Claudia Hammond. The programme will air four times between 7th and 11th May 2014; the first 15 minutes of the programme focus on metaphors and cancer.

 

Call for Participation: ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Science

The ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences was inaugurated in 2013; the 2014 event is the second in the series. It will take place 15th to 18th July 2014, at Lancaster University, UK.

This free-to-attend summer school takes place under the aegis of CASS (https://cass.lancs.ac.uk), an ESRC research centre bringing a new method in the study of language – the corpus approach – to a range of social sciences. CASS is investigating the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education.

Who can attend?

A crucial part of the CASS remit is to provide researchers across the social sciences with the skills needed to apply the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics to the research questions that matter in their own discipline. This event is aimed at junior social scientists – especially PhD students and postdoctoral researchers – in any of the social science disciplines. Anyone with an interest in the analysis of social issues via text and discourse – especially on a large scale – will find this summer school of interest.

Programme

The programme consists of a series of intensive two-hour sessions, some involving practical work, others more discussion-oriented.

Topics include: Introduction to corpus linguistics; Corpus tools and techniques; Collecting corpus data; Foundational techniques for social science data – keywords and collocation; Understanding statistics for corpus analysis; Discourse analysis for the social sciences; Semantic annotation and key domains; Corpus-based approaches to metaphor in discourse; Pragmatics, politeness and impoliteness in the corpus.

Speakers include Tony McEnery, Paul Baker, Jonathan Culpeper, and Elena Semino.

The CASS Summer School is one of the three co-located Lancaster Summer Schools in Interdisciplinary Digital Methods; see the website for further information:

http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/summerschool

How to apply

The CASS Summer School is free to attend, but registration in advance is compulsory, as places are limited.

The deadline for registrations is Sunday 8th June 2014.

The application form is available on the event website as is further information on the programme.

 

“Fighting Words Are Rarer Among British Doctors”: ‘Metaphor in End of Life Care’ project findings featured in the New York Times

Key findings from the CASS-affiliated ‘Metaphor in End of Life Care‘ (MELC) project have been featured in the New York Times. Journalist Paula Span interviews Principal Investigator Elena Semino and compares findings from the UK-based project to her own experiences in the US. Whereas ‘British public health leaders and medical practitioners are more apt to talk about the end of life as a “journey” instead of a war, with “pathways” and “steps” instead of fights and weapons’, Span finds frequent references to battles ‘on websites for cancer organizations in the United States, like Susan G. Komen and the American Cancer Society’.

Read more about the team’s findings and Span’s comparison to discursive practices in the US by accessing the full article on the New York Times: Fighting Words Are Rarer Among British Doctors

More about the Metaphor in End of Life Care project at Lancaster University

MELCcoverThe CASS-affiliated Metaphor in End of Life Care project has just released a free resource containing information of interest to many of our readers. Download the document now to learn more about the project, from basic concepts (what is metaphor, and how are they used in everyday life?) to more specific details (why study metaphor in end-of-life care?). Some interesting initial findings are also included. For instance, “Family carers often say that their emotions can only be safely ‘released’ when talking to people who are ‘in the same boat’.” Read on to learn more about the project.

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.