The FORGE is pleased to announce the next speaker for this year’s seminar series: Dr Lara Warmelink (Lancaster). Details of her talk can be found below:

TITLE
“If you go down in the woods today…”

ABSTRACT
Psychologists use different types of automatic language tagging to help analyse participants’ statements in a quick and low cost way. Erik Mac Giolla, Sofia Calderon, Kalle Ask, Timothy Luke and I (all psychologists) were studying the effect of veracity on people’s concreteness when speaking about future actions. We hypothesised that liars would be less concrete than truth tellers. We received data from 6 studies in which participants were interviewed about their future plans, with instruction to either lie or tell the truth. The statements’ concreteness was measured using two automatic language taggers: one based on a 40.000 word dictionary of words rated for concreteness (Brysbaert, Warriner, & Kuperman, 2014) and one based on the Linguistics Category Model (Seih, Beier & Pennebaker, 2017), which uses Treetagger and WordSmith. Both analysis showed that there was no difference between liars and truth tellers in their levels of concreteness. We also found no correlation between the two measures, which led to some concerns about the validity of one (or both?) of the measures. This talk will discuss the problems we encountered and invite your thoughts about the usefulness of operationalizing psychological concepts by language tagging.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 31st Oct, County South B89

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first speaker of the 2018-2019 academic year: Dr Claire Hardaker (Lancaster). Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
THE DEMOS IS IN THE DETAILS: Are women really more misogynistic than men online?

ABSTRACT
In this talk I discuss the 2016 report written by Demos and presented to the House of Commons entitled “The use of misogynistic terms on Twitter”. In this report, Demos undertook “a small scale study examining the use of two popularly used misogynistic terms (‘slut’ and ‘whore’) on the social media platform Twitter” and found that “50% of the total aggressive tweets were sent by women, while 40% were sent by men, and 10% were sent by organisations or users whose genders could not be classified.” The research question in this project is simply this: is Demos right? This talk presents an overview of three follow-up studies – MEGASWAT, MINISWAT1, and MINISWAT2. It then presents more in-depth findings of the third study, MINISWAT2, in which 15,000 tweets were manually coded for author gender, target gender, and purpose. The results from these, unsurprisingly, differ from those found by Demos, but other key issues from the MINISWAT2 findings and about the Demos study are also highlighted.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 10^th Oct, County South B89