{"id":182,"date":"2024-01-18T17:34:38","date_gmt":"2024-01-18T17:34:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/?p=182"},"modified":"2024-01-18T17:34:38","modified_gmt":"2024-01-18T17:34:38","slug":"caiss-talk-series-reports-dr-sharon-glaas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/2024\/01\/18\/caiss-talk-series-reports-dr-sharon-glaas\/","title":{"rendered":"CAISS Talk Series Reports: Dr Sharon Glaas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=caiss_uk\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p>The first CAISS talk was held in September with a fabulous session from Dr Sharon Glaas on \u201cMitigating Researcher Bias in Linguistic Studies\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Sharon started by defining bias as \u201cwho gets to talk and who is listened to\u201d. For example do stay at home Mums have a voice? Sharon studies linguistics \u2013 the systematic study of language and communication \u2013 functional and descriptive not prescriptive e.g. linguistic sources of persuasion. She reminded us how the social world is studied based on how it is constructed. Some highlights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Linguistics frequently work in an interdisciplinary, multi disciplinary way \u2013 working with other disciplines highlights the issue of bias in ways of thinking.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0How you talk about something affects how you view it. E.g. Pro-life versus anti abortion.<\/li>\n<li>Constructivist versus positivist perspectives, the social world versus the real or natural world \u2013 what is the truth and how is meaning perceived?<\/li>\n<li>Bias is part of the world that we live in. We cannot remove it but we need to be aware of it and try to mitigate it.<\/li>\n<li>Media literacy is most important.<\/li>\n<li>One of the biggest red flags is the use of Large Language models (LLM\u2019s) and how they are being framed. AI does not know things it just repeats them.<\/li>\n<li>People \u201cpull down\u201d on large chunks of language and a LLM will just predict what the next word is.<\/li>\n<li>Language is an issue as LLM\u2019s do not learn.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sharon also elaborated on her interesting work in a corpus assisted study of political and media discourses around the EU in the lead up to Brexit. She found that the pro \u2013EU stance of the Guardian was systematically undermined by three key themes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Discourses of Conflict between UK \/ EU and EU \/ Member states<\/li>\n<li>Discourses of Disparity of citizen\u2019s experience (EU not working)<\/li>\n<li>Discourses of Threat to the UK and an existential risk to the EU.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We all have linguistic biases \u2013 ways of conceiving and talking about things that are grounded in our world view. Sharon does not believe it is possible to entirely eliminate bias from our work \u2013 but awareness and transparency help mitigate the issue. She stressed in her conclusion that it is important to understands the impact of those biases as use of LLM\u2019s and AI tools become more prevalent.<\/p>\n<p>We had excellent feedback from Sharon\u2019s talk, one delegate said it was \u201cthe best one hour briefing they had heard in a very long time\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first CAISS talk was held in September with a fabulous session from Dr Sharon Glaas on \u201cMitigating Researcher Bias in Linguistic Studies\u201d. Sharon started by defining bias as \u201cwho&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/2024\/01\/18\/caiss-talk-series-reports-dr-sharon-glaas\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">CAISS Talk Series Reports: Dr Sharon Glaas<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1669,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talk-review","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1669"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}