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Visiting With The Brown Family
In 2011 I gave a plenary talk on how American English is changing over time (contrasting it with British English), using the Brown Family of corpora. Each member of the Brown family consists of a corpus of 1 million words of written, published, standard English, divided into 500 files each of about 2000 words each.…
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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,…
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Two approaches to keywords
On July 4th, 2013, I gave a presentation on keywords at a meeting of the Keywords Project at Jesus College, Cambridge University. The Keywords Project uses Raymond Williams’ concept of keywords as being socially prominent words (e.g. art, industry, media or society) that are capable of bearing interlocking, yet sometimes contradictory contemporary meanings, and the group…
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Beyond ‘auto-complete search forms’: Notes on the reaction to ‘Why do white people have thin lips?’
As Paul Baker reported yesterday, a paper that we co-authored entitled “‘Why do white people have thin lips?’ Google and the perpetuation of stereotypes via auto-complete search forms” (published 2013 in Critical Discourse Studies 10:2) has recently been garnering some media attention, being cited in the Mail Online and the 18 May 2013 print issue of The…
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In the press: Google and the perpetuation of stereotypes
The findings of a paper published by myself and Amanda Potts on the implications of Google’s auto-complete search function have been reported in Mail Online and The Telegraph (18 May 2013). The paper examined what happens when the beginnings of questions about different identity groups are entered into Google’s search form. For example, typing “why…
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Call for Participation: ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences
We are very pleased to issue the first call for participation for our ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, which will take place at Lancaster University 16th-19th July 2013. This event takes place under the aegis of CASS, a new ESRC research centre bringing a new method in the study of language – the…
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.