PhD Research
I am the current holder of the Sir Henry Thomas Scholarship in the Department of Hispanic Studies in the University of Birmingham.
My PhD research very much continues from my MPhil research. In that course, I showed that meaning can be affected by the socio-political environment of the day, and changes in this will manifest themselves as changes in the probability that the keyword under investigation will co-occur with certain other words which make up its context.
With my PhD work, I have turned this question around to try to find out whether it is possible to analyse, both objectively and quantitatively, changes in the politics of an influential individual, on the basis of the words that they use and how these words cluster with other words.
The subject of my research in Venezuela's controversial president, Hugo Chávez. He was chosen as much for the availability of data (I work with the transcripts of his weekly TV show, Aló Presidente, which are published online by the Venezuelan Ministry for Popular Power in Communication and Information) and the opportunity to introduce corpus techniques in Romance Languages, as for his well-reported outbursts.
Since this is still a work in progress, I am limited as to the amount of detail I can give publicly (outside of an academic situation) without risking the thesis ceasing to be 'original work'. Some of my presentations on my work are, however, available below.
My supervisors are Professor Wolfgang Teubert from the Centre for Corpus Research and Doctor Pat Odber in the Department of Hispanic Studies.
Conferences and Presentations:
The following links will take you to PDF versions of slides used at various conference presentations.
- The Semantic Web and its use for linguists at Birmingham University English Department Postgraduate Seminar, January 2006.
- Initial research findings at Women in Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Birmingham, 16 October 2006
- Transnational Discourse and Cultural Identity at European cultural identities: from the national to the transnational, University of Birmingham, 16 March 2007
- From Bolivarianism to Socialism: A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Hugo Chávez's Discourse at Spanish in Society, Swansea University, 28 March 2008. (An audio recording of a previous version of this presentation, given at Birmingham University on 1st February 2008, is available on request.)