Iganski and Sweiry – Social Media and the Gaza conflict of 2014

/ Jennifer Hughes

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speakers: Prof Paul Iganski and Dr Abe Sweiry (Law; Centre for Law & Society; Centre for Crime, Law & Justice). Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Social Media and the Gaza conflict of 2014

ABSTRACT
It is now well-known that each time there is an upsurge in the Israel-Palestine conflict there is a rise in violent and other abusive incidents against Jews around the world. So it was in 2014 with Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ military operation in July and August. This time around, however, a seeming upsurge of anti-Jewish abuse over social media was noticeable. By the end of July 2014, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz reported “an explosion” of such abuse on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Using corpus approaches, we carried out a rapid response analysis of the phenomenon on Twitter to inform a forthcoming report of the All-Party Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism for an inquiry established by the Committee following the 2014 Gaza war. In this seminar, we will discuss our methods of analysis, the key findings, and the potential we see for the future in using corpus approaches for the analysis of antisemitism and other manifestations of discriminatory discourse.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 5th Feb, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

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

/ Claire

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.

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

/ Claire

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.

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

/ Claire / 1 Comment

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.

Fitzgerald – Uncovering staged suicide

/ Claire

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first ever external guest speaker: James R. Fitzgerald. Jim is a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent who, during his long career in the FBI, worked on high profile cases such as those of the Unabomber, Jon Benet Ramsey, and the D.C. Sniper. Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Uncovering staged suicide: Case studies in authorship attribution
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