UCREL and the FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by Prof Laurence Anthony and Dr Claire Hardaker. Laurence is a Professor in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Waseda University, Japan, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University. Claire is a Lecturer in Forensic Corpus Linguistics at Lancaster University. Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Applications of FireAnt in Forensic (Corpus) Linguistics: Identifying Angels on Ashley Madison

ABSTRACT
Ashley Madison (AM) is a website that describes itself as “the most famous name in infidelity and married dating” and uses the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair.” The AM site was created in 2001 by Avid Life Media Inc. (ALM), taking its name from the two most popular girls’ names of the time. ALM’s then-CEO, Noel Biderman, repeatedly supported the philosophy of extra-marital affairs, but unsurprisingly, not everyone agreed with him. In July 2015, an anonymous group calling itself the Impact Team contacted ALM and ordered them to take down AM, as well as an associated site, Established Men. When ALM did not comply, over a series of days in August 2015, the Impact Team released onto the dark net several large data-dumps containing a wide array of information about thirty to forty million AM users, including email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, relationship status, physical descriptions, personal habits, and sexual preferences. Within hours of this leak, it became apparent that not all the accounts at AM were operated by humans. Instead, some (known as “Angels” in emails sent between members of the management team) were operated by software. In this presentation, we describe the results of an investigation into the AM Angel accounts and discuss ways in which we can establish their differences from ordinary user accounts. To conduct the investigation, we used a newly developed freeware tool called FireAnt that enabled us to easily extract relevant data from the AM data sources, visualize that data in the form of time-series plots, network graphs, and geolocation maps, and export data for further analysis using traditional corpus tools. As part of the presentation, we will introduce the FireAnt tool and show how it can be used to conduct similar analyses on other datasets.

BIO
Dr. Laurence Anthony is a Professor in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Waseda University, Japan. He is a former director of the Center for English Language Education (CELESE) and is the coordinator of the CELESE technical English program. He received the M.A. degree in TESL/TEFL, and the Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham, UK, and the B.Sc. degree in mathematical physics from the University of Manchester, UK. His research interests include corpus linguistics, educational technology, natural language processing (NLP), and genre analysis.

TIME & PLACE
W20, 1500-1600, Thu 17^th Mar, Furness LT2

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Dr Willem Hollmann (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Prof Awais Rashid (Computing & Communications; Security Lancaster). Details of his talk are below:

The Literacy Research Discussion Group is delighted to announce their external guest speaker: Prof Rodney Jones. Rodney is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Head of Department at the University of Reading. Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
‘Have you swiped your Nectar card?’: Pretextuality and practices of surveillance

ABSTRACT
Pretextuality is a key concept in discourse analysis, through it perhaps has not received the degree of analytical attention that it deserves. It is usually defined as the set of expectations we bring to texts and the situations of which texts are part that help us to understand the purpose of the text and the goals of its author. As Widdowson (2004) argues, ‘All texts are designed to be understood pre-textually…it is the pretextual purpose that we bring to texts that controls how we engage with them and regulate the focus of our attention.’ Whereas Widdowson’s focus is on pretextuality as an interpretive tool, Maryns and Blommaert ( 2002:14) view it more from the perspective of discourse production. For them, pretexts constitute ‘conditions of sayability’: the ‘socially preconditioned meaning assessments, textuality resources and entextualisation potential’ that that allow certain people to say certain things in certain situations. In their analysis of migration stories told by asylum seekers, for example, they show how pretextuality functions to deny discursive resources to particular kinds of people. For ‘social engineers’ (Hagnagy, 2011) and ‘con-men’ involved in things like identity theft, pretextualtiy has a rather different meaning: ‘Pretexting’ is the practice of creating an invented scenario (a pretext) to engage a targeted victim in revealing sensitive information about themselves. While Maryns and Blommaert’s concern with pretextuality focuses on the way it can deny speech to certain individuals, social engineers are more interested in the way it functions to compel speech.

This paper will consider pretexuality in the the context of digital surveillance of the kind regularly engaged in by internet companies (like Facebook and Google), software developers, and retail firms in order to gather consumer data. The question I will be asking is: what are the discursive strategies such entities use to compel users to engage in ‘discourse producing activities’ that result in ‘capta’ (‘captured’ data about users identities, their mundane activities, and their preferences and predilections). The analysis focuses on three ‘case studies’ of ‘pretexting”: 1) online quizzes (such as ‘What Shakespearean character are you?’) of the type often encountered on Facebook; 2) mobile apps which gather information from your smartphone (including your location, your contact list, and your communication with others); and 3) retail loyalty cards such as the ‘Nectar card’ which promise benefits to shoppers who are willing to reveal details about their purchasing behaviour. The analysis will combine all three of the definitions of pretextuality discussed above: Pretextuality as a matter of communicative conventions (or ‘frames), as a function of social power and regimes in inclusion and exclusion, and as an a social practice, an interactional accomplishment dependent on the form and structure of different kinds of ‘conversations’. Understanding pretextuality in the context of digital surveillance, it will argue, requires not just an analysis of of texts and the social contexts in which they occur, but also of the moment by moment unfolding of the social interactions (involving both humans and algorithms) in which texts and contextualization cues are deployed and relationships of power and inequality are constructed.

Hadnagy, C. (2011). Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Maryns, K. and Blommaert, J. (2002) Pretextuality and pretextual gaps: On de/refining linguistic inequality, Pragmatics 12 (1)

Widdowson, H. G. (2004). Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

BIO
Rodney’s main areas of interest are discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and language and digital media. He is particularly interested in how digital media affect the way people conduct social interactions and manage social identities. For the past two decades he has been involved with the late Professor Ron Scollon and other colleagues in developing an approach to discourse called mediated discourse analysis, the principles of which are laid out in his 2005 book with Sigrid Norris Discourse in Action: Introducing mediated discourse analysis. He has applied this approach to a range of contexts including health and risk communication, classroom discourse, professional communication, computer mediated communication, and language and creativity. Rodney has authored/edited twelve books and over fifty journal articles and book chapters.

Before joining the University of Reading, Rodney worked in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong, where he acted as Head of Department from 2012 to 2014. While in Hong Kong he conducted a number of large scale funded research projects having to do with the digital literacies of secondary school students, HIV prevention and education, food labelling, collaborative writing in the creative industries, and laypeople’s communication of scientific and medical information. He is interested in supervising projects on language and (new) media), mediated discourse analysis/nexus analysis, language and gender/sexuality, language and creativity, and health and risk communication.

TIME & PLACE
W13, 1600-1800, Mon 25^th Jan, Bownland North Seminar Room 10

The FORGE and the Pragmatics & Stylistics Research Group (PaSty) are delighted to announce our second joint external guest speaker of 2015: Dr Magdalena Leitner. Magdalena is a teaching and research assistant at the University of Zurich. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
The metadiscourse of verbal offences in 16th-/17th-century Scottish law courts

ABSTRACT
The way people talk about other people’s communicative behaviour in conflicts offers great insights into notions of offensive language use, in the present and in the past (see Bax and Kádár, 2011: 12, Culpeper, 2011: 71-112). This study reconstructs the metadiscourse of verbal offences in 16th-/17th-century Scottish court records, addressing the following questions: which terms were used in lawsuits to judge verbal offences? What do they reveal about period- and context-specific notions of offensive language use? Court records are valuable sources for investigating historical perceptions of verbal offences because everyday conflicts were recorded as legal evidence (see Kytö et al., 2011: 1).

The present investigation contributes to the growing body of historical metadiscourse studies on impoliteness, verbal aggression and related concepts (Archer, 2014, Bös, 2014, McEnery, 2006). It combines Culpeper’s (2011) perception-based concept of impoliteness with qualitative methods and insights from historical pragmatics. Data were drawn from the records of the central criminal court in Edinburgh and from local Scottish church courts between 1560 and 1660 (see Sources below). The Historical Thesaurus of the OED was consulted as a reference point when categorising the collected terms for verbal offences.

Findings suggest that criminal and ecclesiastical courts had mostly distinct vocabularies for judging verbal offences, but shared major semantic concepts, namely breaches of morals and offences against authorities. Both court types had relatively large inventories of evaluative expressions for offensive language use. However, a small set of apparently standard legal terms was predominant, which corresponds to previous observations concerning the formulaic nature of 16th-century Scottish legal discourse (Graham, 1996: 74, Kopaczyk, 2013, Todd, 2002: 19). Surprisingly, church courts did not show a clear preference for judging verbal offences in religious terms. Distribution patterns of verbal offence terms across different trial stages indicate shifts in communicative purposes from less evaluative recording of facts to the highly evaluative tone of courtroom accusations.

BIO
Magdalena Leitner joined the UZH English Department as a Teaching and Research Assistant in October 2014. She completed her PhD on Conflicts in Early Modern Scottish Letters and Law Courts in May 2015. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Professor Jeremy J. Smith at the University of Glasgow, UK, where she also spent three years before returning to Switzerland. Magdalena holds a Lizenziat degree (i.e. a joint BA & MA) from the University of Zurich in English Linguistics and Literature, Educational Psychology and Film Studies. She wrote her Lizenziatsarbeit (i.e. Masters thesis) on the topic of Thou and You in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English Witness Depositions, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Andreas H. Jucker.

TIME & PLACE
W06, 1300-1400, Fri 13^th Nov, County South D72

The FORGE and the Lancaster University Phonetics Lab are delighted to announce our first joint external guest speaker of 2015: Dr Erica Gold. Erica began working at the University of Huddersfield in 2014, and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
What can Bayes do for you? Using phonetic and linguistic evidence in the courtroom

ABSTRACT
The forensic sciences are currently undergoing what Saks and Koehler (2005) have suggested is a ‘paradigm shift’. That is more and more forensic scientists are adopting the likelihood ratio framework for presenting forensic evidence in the courtroom. This talk will provide a basic introduction to Bayesian statistics and likelihood ratios, with an emphasis on phonetic and linguistic evidence. The presentation will consider the current methods for presenting phonetic and linguistic evidence in the UK, and also provide empirical results from likelihood ratio research using phonetic parameters. The talk will then conclude by looking at potential avenues for development in the field.

TIME & PLACE
W05, 1600-1700, Wed 04^th Nov, Frankland Colloquium

The FORGE and the Pragmatics & Stylistics Research Group (PaSty) are delighted to announce our first joint external guest speaker of 2015: Danuta Reah. 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 that 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? the way a voice identified a criminal decades after the crime. It also looks at the ways a novelist can weave stories around the secrets hidden in language.

BIO
Danuta Reah published her first novel, Only Darkness, in 1999. She has subsequently written seven novels, the latest being The Last Room. She had 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 website. Danuta is also on Twitter and Facebook.

TIME & PLACE
W04, 1600-1700, Tue 27^th Oct, Management School Lecture Theatre 3

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Prof Paul Baker (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Hate speech on the down-low: Jan Moir, Stephen Gately and the Daily Mail

ABSTRACT
This talk is concerned with the analysis of an opinion article about the death of pop star Stephen Gately published in the The Daily Mail on 23 October 2009. The article received the highest number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (over 25,000) ever recorded, with many people claiming that the author, Jan Moir, was homophobic, although the complaints were not upheld. A linguistic analysis reveals that while the article contains no clear-cut uses of homophobic language there are some ambiguous statements which could be interpreted in multiple ways. However, by complementing the linguistic analysis with a wider-ranging context-based analysis, including reference to discourse prosodies via the British National Corpus, social attitudes research, other Mail articles, the Press Complaints Commission guidelines and audience reception, I hope to show that a convincing argument can be made that the article probably was homophobic. In terms of making a case for the presence of “hate speech”, I argue then that we must go beyond the words in texts, to consider how they are positioned within social context.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 20th Nov, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Prof Paul J. Taylor (Psychology). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Email Physics: What can we infer about hierarchies, groupiness and deceit from everyday emails

ABSTRACT
Much can be inferred from the way an author changes his or her language during social interaction. I will describe our efforts to measure linguistic accommodation (or verbal mimicry if you’re a psychologist) and how these measures can be used to infer social position and social motive. I will report one study that demonstrates how mimicry in email replies varies as a function of recipient closeness in a way that fulfills Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis. I will report a second study that shows how a reduction in language mimicry amongst coworkers may be used to detect workers attempting an insider attack on their organisation.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 30th Oct, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first ever internal speaker: Dr Alistair Baron (Computing & Communications; Security Lancaster). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Using language analysis to predict age and gender with fake online personas

ABSTRACT
There are a variety of reasons why people choose to use fake profiles online, ranging from the perfectly innocent to deception in order to commit serious crimes. I will demonstrate how differences in language use can be utilised to predict age and gender, even when individuals are attempting to hide their true identity. The irregular nature of online texts poses significant barriers to language analysis, but by pre-processing texts with spelling normalisation, much of the negative impact can be nullified. It will also be shown that the spelling irregularities themselves can be used to aid age and gender prediction.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 09th Oct, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend. Note that this venue has a maximum seating capacity of 20.

IF YOU MISSED IT:

You can watch an earlier version of this talk.