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

 

In the coming academic year, FORGE will run a monthly writing retreat, starting in October 2018 and ending in April 2019. Full details can be found here.

With many apologies, we’ve noticed that the FORGE elves goofed and miswrote the time of Tim’s talk on Wednesday 22nd as starting at 12:00. Tim’s talk will in fact start at 13:00.

The elves have had their chocolate confiscated for the rest of the day.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our third and final external guest speaker: Prof Tim Grant (Aston). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Taking language analysis to Court – How linguistic investigative advice, language evidence, and expert opinion are used in the UK justice system

NOTES
This will be of especial interest to those looking to go into a career in forensic linguistics.

ABSTRACT
In this talk Tim Grant will examine the different roles through which language analysis can be used to improve the delivery of justice in the Courts. Through discussion of a series of cases in which he has been involved he will argue that forensic linguists, acting both as researchers and practitioners, need to focus on a broad variety of use cases and understand better how their analysis can be useful in the criminal and civil justice systems. He will examine the legal context in through which experts (including linguists) give evidence in Court and he will argue that forensic linguistic evidence needs to be methodological rigorous and admissible but also it must include clear and convincing explanation to provide the tryers of fact with a rationale basis for making their decisions.

BIO
Professor Tim Grant is the Director of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University. Tim is on the Ethics and Professional Practice Committee of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and is a member of the Scientific Committee for the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iIIRG). Tim has extensive experience of providing linguistic evidence in a variety of cases including successful investigations into sexual assault, stalking, murder, and terrorism. Tim is particularly interested in forensic authorship analysis focusing on short messages such as text messages and Twitter posts, and he is also interested in how linguists can advise and train police officers to conduct better interviews. Tim’s work has appeared in featured newspaper articles and on BBC radio programmes. Furthermore, after providing a profile of a writer of roughly 60 racially and sexually abusive letters, Tim appeared as part of a media appeal on the BBC Crimewatch programme. This media appeal was successful in finding the offender, who matched the profile proposed by Tim.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Wed 22^nd Mar, Management School Lecture Theatre 6

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Dr Bela Chatterjee (Law). Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
Gender and cyberwarfare – a critical examination of key terms and images

ABSTRACT
In this presentation Dr Chatterjee considers the language and imagery surrounding popular discourses of cyberwarfare, and linking them to questions of gender. Drawing on popular cultural reference points such as James Bond’s Skyfall and newspaper cartoons, she considers potential gender dimensions to cyberwarfare and the possible implications of the gendered constructions of cyberwarfare for International Law discourses on cyber war.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Mon 27^th Feb, County South B89

All are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first external guest speaker of 2017: Former Detective Chief Superintendent Laurence Carr (Merseyside Police).

Details of his talk are below.

TITLE
The practicalities of police interviews

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

This presentation aims to examine the practical obstacles that exist in police interview situations and how police in the UK have developed a method to try to overcome those obstacles so as to maximise disclosure and dialogue. It touches upon the development of the methodology, examines what the interview actually consists of, contrasts and compares differing techniques and examines the arguments for and against. It also looks at such things as how to overcome silence, how to use silence, the power dynamic in the room, effective listening, managing the physical environment, dealing with deliberate obstruction, rapport building, and effective conversation management amongst other topics.

BIO
Laurence Carr spent 30 years in Merseyside Police achieving the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent. He led the Force Major Incident Team and was heavily involved in police interviews in numerous contexts, both as a practitioner and as a strategist. He now leads the Behavioural Assessment Unit at a leading financial services company.

TIME & PLACE
W17, 1200-1400, Thu 02^nd Mar, George Fox Lecture Theatre 3
Note that the talk itself will run from 1200-1300, and Laurence will stay for a further hour in case anyone wishes to chat with him one-to-one.

All are welcome to attend.

UCREL’s CRS and FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by our upcoming internal speakers: Matt Edwards and Steve Wattam (Computing & Communications). Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Why privacy makes privacy research hard

ABSTRACT
Identity resolution capability for social networking profiles is important for a range of purposes, from open-source intelligence applications to forming semantic web connections. Yet research in this area is hampered by the lack of access to ground-truth data linking the identities of profiles from different networks. Almost all data sources previously used by researchers are no longer available, and historic datasets are both of decreasing relevance to the modern social networking landscape and ethically troublesome regarding the preservation and publication of personal data. We present and evaluate a method which provides researchers in identity resolution with easy access to a realistically-challenging labelled dataset of online profiles, drawing on four of the currently largest and most influential online social networks. We validate the comparability of samples drawn through this method and discuss the implications of this mechanism for researchers and potential alternatives and extensions.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Mon 06^th Feb, County South B89

NOTE
Though the speakers are computer scientists, they are aiming this talk at a non-technical audience. This presentation may be of interest to audiences beyond linguistics and/or computing, including those researching big data, online privacy, internet law/criminology, psychology, sociology, digital anthropology and culture, and so forth.

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that Alisdair Gillespie’s talk has been cancelled. We will hopefully reschedule this for the coming academic year.

Please note that Marton Petyko’s room has changed. This talk will now be held in County South B89 (not C89 as advertised previously).