Political text analysis - Prof. Ken Benoit talk this Wednesday 1pm FW101

We are happy to have Prof Ken Benoit from the London School of Economics giving his talk “Beyond a bag of words: Identifying and using multi-word expressions to improve political text analysis”.

Time: 1pm, 21st November 2018

Place: FW101

BIO

Ken Benoit is associate editor of the American Political Science Review.

He is Professor of Quantitative Social Research Methods at the LSE. He is also the current Director of the Social and Economic Data Science (SEDS) Research Unit. Ken’s research focuses on automated, quantitative methods of processing large amounts of textual and other forms of big data – mainly political texts and social media – and the methodology of text mining. He is the creator and co-author of several popular R packages for text analysis, including quanteda, spacyr, and readtext. He has published extensively on applications of measurement and the analysis of text as data in political science, including machine learning methods and text coding through crowd-sourcing, an approach that combines statistical scaling with the qualitative power of thousands of human coders working in tandem on small coding tasks.

Abstract

The rapid growth of applications treating text as data has transformed our ability to gain insight into important political phenomena. Almost universal among existing approaches is the adoption of the bag of words approach, counting each word as a feature without regard to grammar or order. This approach remains extremely useful despite being an ob- viously inaccurate model of how observed words are generated in natural language. Many politically meaningful textual features, however, occur not as unigram words but rather as pairs of words or phrases, especially in language relating to policy, political economy, and law. Here we present a hybrid model for detecting these associated words, known as collocations. Using a combination of statistical detection, human judgement,and machine learning, we extract and validate a dictionary of meaningful collocations from three large corpora totalling over 1 billion words, drawn from political manifestos and legislative floor debates. We then examine how the word scores of phrases in a text model compare to the scores of their component terms.

Media, War & Conflict: New special issue on framing

The journal Media, War & Conflict have published a new special issue on framing. The issue contains a response from the godfather of framing research in the field of war and media, Robert Entman. Thanks to guest editors Sumaya Al Nahed and Philip Hammond. Read the special issue here. We’re delighted the special issue includes a number of rising stars in the field as well as more established scholars.

Media, War & Conflict is a quarterly journal co-edited by Ben O’Loughlin, Katy Parry, Laura Roselle and Sarah Maltby and published by Sage.

Jobs at Sheffield for NewPolCom PhDs Smith and Soo!

In fantastic news for NewPolCom, following their successful PhD defences Dr. Amy Smith and Dr. Nikki Soo have both won positions at the University of Sheffield, ranked #3 for politics research in the UK. Amy and Nikki passed through our MSc programme and went on to produce wonderful PhD theses.

Amy joined the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield in September 2018. She holds the position of University Teacher in British Politics/Public Policy. Amy is Module Leader for two courses in 2018/19: Parliamentary Studies (UG-3) and Never Mind the Ballots: State and Society in the UK (UG-2). She is also co-writing and co-convening a third course with Professor Andrew Hindmoor on British Politics (UG-1). Additionally, Amy supervises undergraduate Research Projects in Parliamentary Studies and in Narcopolitics, and final year undergraduate dissertations. Follow her on Twitter @amypatsmith. 

Nikki Soo is joining the University of Sheffield as postdoctoral research associate at the Sir Bernard Crick Centre. She will work closely with director Dr Kate Dommett on projects with the theme “Politics and the Public” to cultivate debate and encourage citizenship. She will also develop a project on constituent experience and perception of contemporary representation. She’s concurrently a Research Associate with the University of Manchester, where she researches online news consumption and its role in political knowledge gaps with Dr Marta Cantijoch and Professor Rachel Gibson, in partnership with the BBC. Follow her on @sniksw and check out her website for updates.

Congratulations to both, and we look forward to welcoming them back to hear about their new research and to inspire our next generation of graduate students.

O'Loughlin to speak at Dublin event on media and polarization

On 15th October Dublin City University will host an event, Media and Politics in a Polarized World. The notion that news media are causing increased political polarization has taken hold in recent years but evidence is mixed and policy responses in different countries have varied enormously. Are publics more polarized or are we just more aware of extreme views because they are visible on social media? NewPolCom’s Ben O’Loughlin is one of several academic speakers who will address this topic, including the LSE’s Lilie Chouliaraki and Leeds’ Chris Anderson. The event will also feature talks from Sarah Hartley of Google News Lab and Aine Kerr from Neva Labs. The event is organised by Tanya Lokot.

New project funded on youth opinion in Baltic States and Ukraine

Ben O'Loughlin and his colleagues Natalia Chaban and Alister Miskimmon have won a new grant from Jean Monnet for a project to begin later in 2018, Youth Opinion and Opportunities for EU Public Diplomacy: Youth Narratives and Perceptions of the EU and EU-Ukraine Relations in Ukraine and the three Baltic States (E-YOUTH).

The project teams up with universities in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine to conduct a comprehensive analysis of youth opinion (students of higher educational establishments and high schools) in Ukraine and the three Baltic states. The focus is to identify the narratives through which young people views the issues of Ukraine’s relations with the EU, its European orientation and aspirations, and the background of the ongoing violent conflict with Russia. The activity will also specifically focus on the youth views on Ukraine’s relations with the three Baltic states who are EU members. The project will use a mix of surveys and focus groups to identify narratives and perceptions. 

O'Loughlin, Chaban and Miskimmon are currently completing a previous Jean Monnet project exploring views of the EU in Israel, Palestine and Ukraine, reporting to the EU in September. The new project zooms into an area of Europe causing greater concern for NATO, the EU and, most importantly, people living in those countries. This line of research helps us understand how ordinary people - particularly young people - experience being in the centre of geopolitical uncertainty and the stories they tell to make sense of their country and their own situation. 

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship for Matthew Hall

Congratulations are due to Matthew Hall, who has won an ESRC SeNSS Postdoctoral Fellowship for his project, Citizens 3.0 - Who should control the powerful technologies that govern our lives?

Matthew completed his ESRC-funded PhD with us in July 2017, supervised by Jonathan Seglow and Ben O'Loughlin, with a thesis entitled Liberal Democratic Surveillance: Rules, Legitimacy, and the Institutionalisation of Domination. With his Postdoctoral Fellowship, Matthew will have space to publish from his thesis, develop new lines of argument, and engage activists and journalists with his diagnoses of technology and power.

Media, War & Conflict 10th Anniversary Conference, Florence, 22-23 May 2018

The 10th Anniversary Conference of the Media, War & Conflict journal took place in Florence on 22-23 May 2018, generously hosted at Accademia Europea di Firenze. The conference featured a keynote plenary on Women, Conflict and Journalism featuring Barbara Barnett, Linda Steiner, Daniella Peled and Dina Matar, a keynote by Andrew Hoskins, and a screening by Piotr Cieplak of his film The Faces We Lost. 

The Faces We Lost (2017) is a documentary about how Rwandans use personal and family photographs to remember and commemorate the loved ones they lost in the 1994 genocide.

The event was a great success, not least due to the wonderful setting -- and cuisine -- provided by Accademia Europea di Firenze. The papers presented represented a diverse, multi-disciplinary and growing field of research and many new friendships and collaborations were formed. 

The full conference programme can be downloaded here. Curated tweets from the event can be found here. The conference was sponsored by the Sage publishers, Elon University, and the New Political Communication Unit. Special thanks to Laura Roselle and Elon University for making the conference happen.

Calm before the storm. The glamorous editorial team make name badges before the delegates arrive. 

PhD for Adam Drew for Cyber-security research

NewPolCom doctoral student Adam Drew was awarded his PhD on 15 May 2018 after defending this thesis, Cyber-Security: An Analysis of International and Domestic Norm Emergence. His external examiner was Prof. Maura Conway of Dublin City University and his internal examiner was Dr. Tom Dyson of Royal Holloway. Adam was supervised by Prof. Ben O'Loughlin. 

Congratulations to Dr. Drew!

New article on tabloids and misinformation by Chadwick, Vaccari & O'Loughlin in New Media & Society

The tripartite author team of Andy Chadwick, Ben O'Loughlin and Christian Vaccari have published their third recent study examining social media and political behaviour. The article, Do Tabloids Poison the Well of Social Media: Explaining Democratically Dysfunctional News Sharing, is published in New Media & Society. In it, they find that tabloid news is more strongly connected with democratically dysfunctional behaviours, and that many people freely admit to sharing news they know is inaccurate or false. The paper offers unique insights into the reactions of social media users when called out on sharing misinformation - some appear ashamed, others are amused. Does this mean there are more long-term maladies in British democracy that go beyond Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolling? Read here. 

Abstract:

The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing (N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data (N = 17,989 web domains), news article data (N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users (N= 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news.

Sloam study of #votebecause published in New Media & Society

James Sloam has published a new article in New Media & Society entitled, #Votebecause: Youth mobilisation for the referendum on British membership of the European Union. James presents his ethnographic study of student voter mobilisation through new political communication, notably the #votebecause hashtag. Congratulations to James! Read the study here. 

Abstract

For several decades, academics and political commentators have lamented the decline in electoral participation among younger citizens. In the United Kingdom, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds voting in general elections fell from over 60% in 1992 to an average of 40% between 2001 and 2015. Nevertheless, the high youth turnout in 2017 showed that young people will vote if they are interested in an issue or cause. Despite the scholarly interest in youth turnout, few studies have investigated the individual motivations for electoral participation among young people. This article aims to fill this gap. It presents a qualitative analysis of ‘#Votebecause’, an offline–online initiative to encourage students to vote in the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union. The findings identify the importance of social networks, appropriate spaces for communication, deliberation, prior group membership and internal efficacy for engaging young people in the campaign.