The FORGE is delighted to announce our external guest speaker: Kate Barber (T) (Cardiff University). Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
The reframing of rape in extremist online discourses

NOTES
THIS TALK IS ON A TOPIC, AND WILL CONTAIN EXTRACTS OF DATA, THAT SOME MAY FIND DISTRESSING.

DISCRETION IS STRONGLY ADVISED.

ABSTRACT

Linguistic analyses of far-right discourses have traditionally focused on nationalist rhetoric or racist and ethnoreligious-based invective. The explicit anti-feminist stance held by some far-right groups, specifically in relation to sexual offences against women, remains underexplored. This paper outlines initial findings from an ongoing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 100 blog posts on sites identifying as belonging to the Alternative Right (Alt-Right) or the right-wing men’s activist movement known as the Manosphere. While these factions can be distinguished by their primary concerns towards racial diversity (Alt-Right), and men’s rights (Manosphere), this study aims to highlight how their discourses converge in their portrayal of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence against women.

This paper outlines preliminary findings from the second and third year of my PhD research. Using corpus linguistics and a discourse analytical framework based largely on van Dijk’s (1984) and Koller’s (2012) sociocognitive approach to discourse studies and collective identity analysis, the paper discusses how inhabited and ascribed identities promote white male victimhood and portray the mainstream concept of rape culture as a ‘feminist-produced moral panic’ (Gotell & Dutton 2016, p. 65). The presentation includes details of the network analysis I undertook in order to locate the online websites and blogs from which I selected my data; corpora construction; and a comparative analysis of racist and misogynistic constructions of identity in narrative and non-narrative discourses. Finally, some of the ongoing challenges this research has presented will be discussed along with the importance of applying linguistic analyses to develop inoculation narratives (Braddock 2019) and other counter-extremism measures.

References
Braddock, K. (2019). Vaccinating Against Hate: Using Attitudinal Inoculation to Confer Resistance to Persuasion by Extremist Propaganda. Terrorism and Political Violence. DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2019.1693370
Gotell, L. & Dutton, E. (2016). Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist Men’s Rights Discourses on Rape. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. 5(2), 65-80.
Koller, V. (2012). How to Analyse Collective Identity in Discourse – Textual and Contextual Parameters. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines. 5(2), 19-38.
van Dijk, T.A. (1984). Prejudice and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

The talk will be approximately 30-40 minutes in total, with around 10-20 minutes at the end for Q&A.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 13th Feb, County South D72.

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that due to upcoming strike action, Ryan Boyd’s talk has been rescheduled. You can see the updated date, time, and room here.

Please note that Danuta Kot’s talk has been cancelled. We will hopefully reschedule this within this academic year.

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Ryan Boyd (Psychology). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Predatory Parlance: Understanding the Social Psychology of Online Sexual Predators

ABSTRACT
Internet sex stings have become popular throughout the US as a way to catch potential child predators before they have the  opportunity to victimize actual children. Customarily, online conversations between undercover agents and accused offenders are submitted as evidence in the prosecution of these cases. These chats may be used by prosecutors to demonstrate several aspects of the accused’s psychological profile, such as grooming strategies, the extent to which offenders engaged in rapport building or sexual conversations, and the degree to which offenders controlled/dominated the conversations with their online victims. Using psychologically-grounded language analysis methods across two studies, we analyze transcripts in order to gain a glimpse into the motives, intentions, and other psychological processes of the accused as well as the conduct of undercover agents.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Thu 12^th Mar, County South D72

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that, due to unavoidable circumstances, this talk has been cancelled. With luck, we hope to reschedule in the near future.

The FORGE and the LAEL Society are delighted to announce our first joint external guest speaker of 2019: Danuta Kot. Danuta is a crime novelist who has written books featuring forensic linguistics. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
Language, Crime, and Death

ABSTRACT
Please be aware that this talk will involve reference to criminal cases, including murder.

Our language tells more about us than we realise – every time we speak or write, we give away things we don’t intend. This is the field of the forensic linguist, searching for the truth that is hiding behind the words. This talk looks at aspects of forensic linguistics: the man who was hanged because the word ‘the’ appeared in his statement – or did it? It also looks at the ways a novelist can weave stories around the secrets hidden in language.

BIO
Danuta Kot (who also writes as Danuta Reah) published her first novel, Only Darkness, in 1999. She has subsequently written eight novels, the latest being Life Ruins. She has also published prize winning short stories. Crime – or dissent – runs in the family. Her father was declared an enemy of the state by Stalin, and one of her ancestors was hung, drawn and quartered in 1646 for his religious beliefs.

You can find out more about Danuta’s work and life at her websites (here and here). Danuta is also on Twitter and Facebook. [cancelled]

TIME & PLACE
W07, 1300-1500, Wed 20^th Nov, Management School Lecture Theatre 5 [cancelled]

In collaboration with the Linguistics & English Language Department in general, FORGE is delighted to announce our very first talk of the year by our upcoming internal speakers: William Dance and Claire Hardaker (LAEL). Details of the talk are below:

TITLE
Engagement and impact in media and policy: life above and beyond the thesis

ABSTRACT
Undertaking a thesis is, for many people, one of the greatest challenges of their lives, but there can be a tendency to focus simply on getting to, and passing the viva, and then life after that moment can come as an entirely unplanned surprise. In this talk, Claire briefly discusses how, in her role as a supervisor, she guides her students through the maze of impact and engagement – whether with the media, policy makers, practitioners, or beyond – as a way of paving the road for life, and a career, after the thesis. William then gives concrete examples of how his path through engagement and impact is currently playing out for him day to day as a PhD student, including reflections on creating and building his public profile, undertaking a Cabinet Office internship, working with journalists both behind the scenes and in front, and more besides.

Whilst this talk will mainly be about engagement during PhD studies, it may also be useful to MA students and ECRs.

The talk will be approximately 30-40 minutes in total, with around 10-20 minutes at the end for Q&A.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Fri 18^th Oct, Management School LT11

All are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our third external speaker: Olu Popoola (University of Birmingham). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
“It’s the story, stupid!” How MARV (Multivariate Analysis of Register Variation) can save the world from fake news.

ABSTRACT
Computer-aided fake news detection can be a useful complement to human efforts. On its own, fact-checking is often too slow to prevent the viral spread of disinformation; debunking news stories and communicating corrections can also have a backfire effect of reinforcing the false belief (Lazer et al. 2018). Most computational methods frame fake news detection as a text classification task (Shu et al. 2017) and so require data pre-labelled for veracity. However, the complexities of defining fake news (e.g. fabricated facts or undisclosed advertising?), the different types of fake news (imposter news vs. low-quality news vs. inaccurate news), the difficulty in establishing objective ground truth as well as the weaponization and dilution of ‘fake news’ as a concept leave the collection of pre-labelled data fraught with epistemological issues.

Semi-supervised multivariate statistical techniques may overcome these limitations by modelling news veracity as a latent variable whose value can be estimated from the presence of deception clues and a novel deception scoring approach. This study tested the hypothesis that i) there is significant linguistic variation within the online news genre and that ii) variation is correlated with deceptive situational parameters of communication. Multivariate register analysis was conducted on 5000 stories from the political section of 15 online news sources selected as representative of the online news ecosystem (i.e. a mix of UK and US legacy and new online media from across the full political spectrum). Linguistic parameters were defined from a feature set combining lexico-grammatical and cohesion-based features; situational parameters were drawn from expert-defined fake news detection heuristics and used to calculate a deception score. Visualisation techniques (Diwersy, Evert and Neumann, 2014) were used to assess whether this situational analysis revealed any dimensions of deception and deceptive text clusters.

The study found that linguistic variation in the online news genre is highly correlated with the probability of veracity, with absence of narrative the main indicator of potential deception. This result was unexpected as storytelling is generally associated with deception. However, in the context of a profession which places supreme value on the news story it makes sense that narrative register is a key veracity indicator. Semi-supervised multivariate analysis with deception scoring emerges as a viable alternative to text classification for automated deception detection in epistemologically challenging genres.

REFERENCES
Diwersy, S., Evert, S. and Neumann, S., 2014. A weakly supervised multivariate approach to the study of language variation. Aggregating dialectology, typology, and register analysis. linguistic variation in text and speech, pp.174-204.

Lazer, D.M., Baum, M.A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A.J., Greenhill, K.M., Menczer, F., Metzger, M.J., Nyhan, B., Pennycook, G., Rothschild, D. and Schudson, M., 2018. The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), pp.1094-1096.

Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J. and Liu, H., 2017. Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 19(1), pp.22-36.

BIO
Olu Popoola is a PhD candidate researching methods for cross-domain deception detection at the University of Birmingham, and moonlights as a deception detection trainer and OSINT investigator. By day, Olu is a Teaching Fellow at Aston University where he teaches information integrity to future health professionals (a third career, following ten years in advertising and consumer research and another ten in English language teaching). Olu is married with two canal boats and a cat.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 20^th Mar, County South B89

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Ed Dearden (Computing & Communications). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Alternative fakes

ABSTRACT
Lies have always been told to try and influence the opinions of others. But the ease of information-propagation allowed by the web and social media has made it an increasing problem. False information, both intentional (“disinformation”) and unintentional (“misinformation”), propagates like wild fire in this environment. Much research is (rightly!) concerned with characterising disinformation in this social media and online news landscape. Though this focus is understandable, there is much to learn by looking at other forms of false information, as the concept of people spreading lies is, sadly, not a new phenomenon. This talk will discuss some of the challenges of looking at different forms of false information and how the concepts of belief and deceptive intent affect the language of false information. The talk will then discuss a couple of case studies of false information: April Fools hoaxes and the Flat Earth Society forum.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 13^th Mar, County South B89

All are welcome to attend.

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: William Dance (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Linguistics and disinformation: motivations and solutions for sharing fake news

ABSTRACT
Fake news, intentionally factually incorrect news that is published to deceive and misinform its reader, has become a very prominent issue in the public arena in recent years. It has been estimated that factually un-true stories were shared more than 30-million times during the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017) and already in 2019, the British government has published a white paper to tackle the spread of disinformation. However, at its core fake news is a contentious issue: should we even use the term ‘fake news’?; is fake news as damaging as people claim it to be?; can anything be done to stop it?

Fake news is a modern name for a very old phenomenon and it has been an issue for centuries, shown by Charles II’s 17^th century proclamation “to restrain the spreading of false news, and licentious talking of matters of state and government” (Early English Books Online, 2017). Organisations such as the Department for Agitation and Propaganda in Soviet Russia and the Ministry of Popular Culture in Italy all created fake news under different names during the 20^th century and under Hitler’s rule of Germany parts of the press were referred to as the Lügenpresse (literally: lying press). However, it is only in the last five years the term ‘fake news’ has entered our daily lives.

This talk will be a complete beginner’s guide to researching fake news. It will give a history of fake news that will discuss how old the phenomenon is, provide definitions of fake news and will explain why fake news exists. Then, recent seminal works exploring fake news will be discussed as well as the various government reports that are currently being published across the world to tackle fake news. I’ll then go on to give a work-in-progress report of my current research into fake news and give some examples of cursory data analysis that looks at social media users’ motivations and rationales for disseminating fake news online.

References
Allcott, H. & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-236.

Donath, J. (1999). Identity and deception in the virtual community. In Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge. (pp. 343-359).

Guess, A., Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2018). Selective exposure to misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 US presidential campaign. European Research Council, 9.

Hardaker, C. (2013). “Uh…..not to be nitpicky,,,,,but…the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”: an overview of trolling strategies. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1 (1). pp. 57-86.

Rayson, P. (2008). From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 519-549.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 06^th Mar, County South B89

All are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our second external guest speaker: Dr David Wright (NTU). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
“You need to speak in English, you’re in f***ing England”: how the British press fan the flames of linguistic discrimination

ABSTRACT
Every so often a story of linguistic discrimination makes the national news in Britain. Whether it’s offensive graffiti in an East London borough, tourists being verbally abused in the street, or acts of physical violence towards people on the tube, the motivation for these attacks is the same – the victims aren’t native English speakers.

In this talk, I demonstrate the ways in which such criminal behaviours have been at best legitimised, and at worst incited, by some sections of the British national press. I examine the ways in which non-native English speakers living in Britain are framed as a ‘problem’ for the native English majority, and how discriminatory, exclusionary and prejudiced ideologies about race, ethnicity and nationality are packaged in discourse about ‘language’.

Using a 5-million word corpus of British press reporting from 2005-2017, I explore the various ways in which non-native English speakers are vilified and demonised by the press. I also trace the development of certain discourses over time, and the means by which particular ideologies and arguments are ushered into the public debate, before being escalated and amplified. Most specifically, I observe the impact that the results of the 2011 Census had on the nature of such reporting, when it was revealed that 138,000 people (or 0.26% of the British population) do not speak English.

BIO
Dr David Wright is a forensic linguist at Nottingham Trent University. His research applies methods of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis in forensic contexts and aims to use language analysis to help improve the delivery of justice. His research spans across a range of intersections between language and the law, language in crime and evidence, and discourses of abuse, harassment and discrimination. He is co-author of An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence (with Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson) and has published in international journals in forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics and critical discourse studies.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 27^th Feb, County South B89