Ants On Fire

Posted on April 4 2016 by Laurence Anthony

Being an honorary research fellow at CASS is not only a great honor but a great pleasure. In December
of 2015, my initial three-year fellowship at CASS was extended for a further three years, and this introduced the possibility of returning to Lancaster for a sabbatical-length seven-week research stay between February and March of 2016.

The timing of this research stay was especially enjoyable as it coincided with CASS receiving the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for its contributions to computer analysis of world languages in print, speech and online. As part of a week of celebrations at the Centre, I worked with Claire Hardaker of CASS to organize a launch event for our new FireAnt social media analysis toolkit on February 22. FireAnt is a tool that allows researchers to easily extract relevant data from the social media data sources, visualize that data in the form of time-series plots, network graphs, and geolocation maps, and export results for further analysis using traditional corpus tools. At the event, 20 invited participants learned how to use the new tool to analyze Twitter and other social media data sets. They also gave us very valuable comments and suggestions that were immediately incorporated into the software before it was released to the public later on the same day.

Screenshot of FireAnt main display

Following the release of FireAnt, I then worked with Claire over the next few weeks on our first research project utilizing the software – a forensic corpus linguistics analysis of the Ashley Madison dataset. Here, we used FireAnt to identify the creation and activities of automated ‘Angel’ accounts on the site. We presented preliminary results from this analysis at a UCREL/Forge event on March 18 that was attended by a wide number of forensic linguists, corpus linguists, computer scientists, and others around the university.

Time-series analysis account creation in the AshleyMadison data set

One of the great advantages of being at Lancaster is that it is home to excellent scholars that are interested in the entire span of linguistics fields. Since my one-year sabbatical at Lancaster, I’ve had the pleasure to work with Marije Michel in the Dept. of Linguistics and English Language who uses eye tracking methodology in her research into Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and written Synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (SCMC). Returning to Lancaster allowed us to work together further to develop a new eye-tracking tool that has applications not only in SLA, TBL and SCMC research, but also corpus linguistics. Again, we presented these ideas at a UCREL event held on March 10, and we are now in the process of writing up the research for publication.

Although this research visit was mainly focused on FireAnt development, I fortunately had time to also continue work on some of the other projects that were initiated during my sabbatical year. Meeting up again with Paul Baker allowed us to consider the next stage of development of ProtAnt, which we will be presenting at the TaLC 12 conference. I also met up with Paul Rayson and CASS’s new lecturer in digital humanities, Steve Wattam, to discuss how we can promote an understanding of tools development and programming skills among corpus linguistics (an area of interest that I have had for several years now). Sadly, my schedule prevented me from joining them at the BBC #newsHack, but I was so happy to hear that Steve’s team won the Editorial Prize at the event.

Nothing beats having an entire sabbatical year to focus on research and collaborate with the excellent members of the CASS. But, this seven-week research visit comes a very enjoyable second. I would like to thank Tony McEnery and his team for funding the visit and making me feel so welcome again at Lancaster. It was a true pleasure to be back. I look forward to continue working with Tony and the team over the next three years.

Biography:

Laurence Anthony is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Japan, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), Lancaster University, UK. His main interests are in corpus linguistics, educational technology, and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) program design and teaching methodologies. He received the National Prize of the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies (JAECS) in 2012 for his work in corpus software tools design. He is the developer of various corpus tools including AntConc, AntWordProfiler, FireAnt, ProtAnt, and TagAnt.

FireAnt has officially launched!

Posted on March 2 2016 by Rosie Knight

Laurence Anthony and Claire Hardaker first introduced FireAnt at the CL2015 conference. In their talk, Claire explained that her work with the Discourse of Online Misogyny (DOOM) project had led her to realise that when working with Twitter data, you fast encounter a large array of problems: how to easily collect data, how to arrange that data in a useful way, and how you then analyse that data effectively. It was these problems that had led to the creation of FireAnt, a freeware social media and data analysis toolkit. Laurence and Claire showed the CL2015 audience a beta version of FireAnt, and it’s safe to say it was very well received… the Q&A at the end of their talk went along the lines of ‘it will be publicly available, right?’, ‘when can I get my hands on it?’, and ‘can I sign up to help you trial the beta version?’.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the wait is over. On Monday 22^nd February, Laurence and Claire officially launched FireAnt; it became available to the public on Laurence Anthony’s website, and they held a launch event at Lancaster University to teach people how to use the tool. Here’s a little about what I learnt at this launch event…

FireAnt is not just for analysing social media data; it’s also for collecting it…

FireAnt makes collecting tweets incredibly easy. All you have to do is enter a search term, specify how long you want FireAnt to collect tweets for (or set a maximum number of tweets you want it to collect), and go away and have a cup of tea. To trial this, I instructed FireAnt to start collecting tweets that contained the hashtag #feminism. While I munched my way through two biscuits and two cups of tea, 675 tweets were posted on Twitter containing the hashtag #feminism; FireAnt collected all of these.

FireAnt helps you extract the data you’re actually interested in…

When you collect social media data, you don’t just collect texts that people have posted online. You also collect lots of information about these texts – for example, the date and time that each text was posted on the internet, the username of the person who posted the content, the location of that user, etc. This means that the file containing all your data is often very large, and you have to extract the bits you want to work with. This sounds simple but in reality it’s not, unless you’re a fairly capable programmer and have a computer with a decent amount of memory. However, with FireAnt, the process is much simpler. FireAnt automatically detects what information you have in your file, allows you to filter this, and creates new files with the information you’re interested in (without crashing your computer!).

FireAnt can also help you analyse your data….

At the launch event, we experimented with three different analysis features of FireAnt. Firstly, FireAnt allows you to gather timeseries data, showing the usage of a particular word within your dataset across time. You can use this to produce pretty graphs, such as the one below, or export the data to Excel.

Secondly, FireAnt can produce Geoposition maps. For example, below is a picture of Abi Hawtin, one of CASS’ research students, who’s looking very excited because she used FireAnt to create a map showing the different locations that the tweets in her dataset were posted from:

Thirdly, FireAnt allows you to easily produce network graphs, like the one below:One great feature of these graphs is that they allow you to plot lots of different things. These types of graphs are typically hard to produce but with a tool like FireAnt it’s easy.

What are you waiting for? Time to try FireAnt out for yourself!

CASS represented at Winter Reception of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism

Posted on December 18 2015 by Abe Sweiry

Paul Iganski and Cat Smith MP for Lancaster & Fleetwood, and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, at the Winter Reception.

On Wednesday, 16^th December, Paul Iganski and Abe Sweiry attended the Winter Reception of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism in the Terrace Pavilion at the Houses of Parliament. Attendees heard speeches from John Mann MP, the chair of the Group, Commander Dean Haydon from the Metropolitan Police Service and Baroness Williams of Trafford, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The event ended a significant year for the APPG against antisemitism, in which it published its second major inquiry into antisemitism. John Mann MP instigated the report into the lessons that could be learned from the upsurge of anti-Jewish incidents associated with last year’s conflict in Gaza.

Professor Iganski and Dr Sweiry, as part of a team from Lancaster University’s ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), were commissioned by the APPG to provide a rapid-response analysis of antisemitism on Twitter during the conflict to inform the Inquiry’s report.

In highlighting the findings from CASS in the Inquiry report, the APPG called the analysis of Tweets ‘a unique piece of research which provides valuable and important early indications of trends that occurred during the summer’. [1]

The report recommended further research of the kind offered by CASS stating that ‘the importance of this research should not be underestimated. It helps identify some of the themes in discourse and with time could help to detect patterns of antisemitism and therefore to better direct resources to combat it’. [2]

In the intervening months between the report’s publication and the Winter reception, a progress review of the implementation of the APPG’s recommendations noted that ‘the CPS has pledged to review its guidance relating to communications sent via social media and review the handling of such cases within CPS Areas.’ [3]

[1] All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism (APPG) (2015) Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, London: APPG, page 51.

[2] All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism (APPG) (2015) Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, London: APPG, page 53.

[3] All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism (APPG) (2015) Implementation of the All-Party Parliamentary Report into Antisemitism: feedback and responses, London: APPG, page 4.