CAISS Autumn/Winter talk series: Dr Lewys Brace

Lewys Brace is a Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science and Co-Director of the University of Exeter’s Q-Step Centre, where he specialises in data science, artificial intelligence, extremism, terrorism, cybercrime, security, and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).  His research currently focuses on online extremist radicalisation and the development of computational research methods for the social sciences and has appeared in journals such as Terrorism and Political Violence, Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and Perspectives on Terrorism.

His Talk will cover:

Incels, short for “involuntary celibate”, is an online sub-culture where individuals define themselves by their inability to form sexual relationships with women. The incel ideology has come to be seen as a specific domestic homeland security threat due to the increasing number of attacks being committed by those who have engaged with incel content online. The conglomerate of online spaces that host incel and incel-related content is referred to as the “incelosphere”, and is just one example of numerous online extremist ecosystems. Recent years have seen an increase in the amount of work using large-scale, data-driven, analysis methods to understand such ecosystems, and this work typically utilises text data acquired from online spaces, which is then analysed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. However, there are several points along the road from data collection, through to interpretation of results where biases can emerge when using such methods on these online sub-cultures. This talk will cover the 6 main areas where such biases can emerge by using the Con.Cel project, the first large-N multi-online space analysis of the incelosphere, as an example.

If you wish to attend, please email caiss@lancaster.ac.uk or join the mailing list here