Claire Hardaker (linguist)

Last updated

Claire Hardaker
Born (1981-01-16) 16 January 1981 (age 43)
Dewsbury, United Kingdom
Children3
AwardsPart of the team awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education
Academic background
Alma mater Lancaster University
Thesis Trolling in computer-mediated communication: Aggression and deception online  (2012)
Doctoral advisorJonathan Culpeper
InstitutionsLancaster University
Website Hardaker on the website of Lancaster University

Claire Hardaker (born 16 January 1981) is a British linguist. She is senior lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. Her research involves forensic linguistics and corpus linguistics. Her research focuses on deceptive, manipulative, and aggressive language in a range of online data. She has investigated behaviours ranging from trolling and disinformation to human trafficking and online scams. Her research typically uses corpus linguistic methods to approach forensic linguistic analyses.

Contents

She has worked in the Department of Linguistics and English Language [1] at Lancaster University since 2013.

Career and research

Hardaker received her MA in Language Studies in 2007, and her PhD in Linguistics in 2012 from Lancaster University. She taught English Language and Linguistics at the University of Central Lancashire as an associate lecturer, and then as a lecturer from 2007 to 2012. In 2013 she took a position as lecturer in Forensic Corpus Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Forensic Corpus Linguistics in 2017. [2]

Hardaker has been principal investigator (PI) and co-investigator (CI) on research grants from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). As part of the £5 million ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS), [3] Hardaker has investigated different manifestations of online abuse, including strategies, motivations, and responses. [4] Hardaker has also been CI on projects funded by Her Majesty's Government, [5] and co-researcher on research funded by the European Commission, investigating anti-trafficking, and the deployment of anti-trafficking funds across the European Union. [6]

Hardaker has appeared on television and radio, [7] [8] and in documentaries, [9] [10] [11] podcasts, [12] [13] [14] and print media around the world [15] [16] [17] on topics ranging from online abuse, [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] to the Word of the Year, [23] to the language of children online, [24] [25] [26] [27] to the decryption of the Voynich manuscript. [28] [29] Her research has been discussed in the House of Commons, [30] and she has written for The Guardian and The Observer, [31] The Independent, [32] The Conversation, [33] the Political Studies Association, [34] among others.

Hardaker serves on the editorial board of Internet Pragmatics , [35] directs the Forensic Linguistics Research Group (FORGE) [36] [37] at Lancaster University, is the co-creator of the free software, FireAnt, designed to collect, filter, and export Twitter data, [38] and she publishes a monthly podcast entitled en clair. Each episode typically covers a case involving forensic linguistics, language mysteries, literary detection, decryption of codes and undeciphered languages, and other forms of linguistic intrigue. [39] [40]

Awards and honors

Hardaker's ESRC-funded research on online abuse, undertaken within Lancaster University's Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS) subsequently assisted CASS in being awarded The Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. [41]

Personal life

Hardaker was born in Dewsbury, and grew up in the small village of Tyersal in Bradford. She attended Tong High School until 1995, and sat her A Levels at Bradford College. She has a son and identical twin daughters.[ citation needed ]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voynich manuscript</span> 15th century codex in an unknown script

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an unknown script referred to as 'Voynichese.' The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438). Stylistic analysis has indicated the manuscript may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. While the origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript are still debated, hypotheses range from a script for a natural language or constructed language, an unread code, cypher, or other form of cryptography, or perhaps a hoax, reference work, or work of fiction currently lacking the translation(s) and context needed to both properly entertain or eliminate any of these possibilities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forensic linguistics</span> Application of linguistics to forensics

Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law, is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods, and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics.

Multicultural London English is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London.

Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time. It is used in corpus linguistics for analysis of corpora.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies is related historically and methodologically to the discipline of corpus linguistics. The principal endeavor of corpus-assisted discourse studies is the investigation, and comparison of features of particular discourse types, integrating into the analysis the techniques and tools developed within corpus linguistics. These include the compilation of specialised corpora and analyses of word and word-cluster frequency lists, comparative keyword lists and, above all, concordances.

Elena Lieven is a British psychology and linguistics researcher and educator. She was a senior research scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology in Leipzig, Germany. She is also a professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester where she is director of its Child Study Centre and leads the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD).

The Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System (CLAWS) is a program that performs part-of-speech tagging. It was developed in the 1980s at Lancaster University by the University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language. It has an overall accuracy rate of 96-97% with the latest version (CLAWS4) tagging around 100 million words of the British National Corpus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachael Bland</span> British journalist and presenter (1978–2018)

Rachael Rebecca Bland was a British journalist and presenter from Cardiff, Wales. She worked for BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC World News and BBC North West Tonight. She was known for her podcast, You, Me and the Big C, which was broadcast while she was ill with breast cancer, and in which she discussed issues and treatment of the disease. In the final months of her life she wrote a memoir, For Freddie, which was published posthumously early the following year.

The Spoken English Corpus (SEC) is a speech corpus collection of recordings of spoken British English compiled during 1984–1987. The corpus manual can be found on ICAME.

The International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) is an international group of linguists and data scientists working in corpus linguistics to digitise English texts. The organisation was founded in Oslo, Norway in 1977 as the International Computer Archive of Modern English, before being renamed to its current title.

Elena Semino is an Italian-born British linguist whose research involves stylistics and metaphor theory. Focusing on figurative language in a range of poetic and prose works, most recently she has worked on topics from the domains of medical humanities and health communication. Her projects use corpus linguistic methods as well as qualitative analysis.

Svenja Adolphs is a British linguist whose research involves analysis of corpus data including sources of multimodal material such as the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus (NMMC) to examine communication in new forms of digital records. Using visual mark-up systems, her work allows a better understanding of the nature of natural language use. She is a co-founder of the Health Language Research Group at the University of Nottingham, bringing together academics and clinicians to advance the work of applied linguistics in health care settings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Majid KhosraviNik</span>

Majid KhosraviNik is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Discourse Studies at Newcastle University, UK.

Paul Baker is a British professor and linguist at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies and language and identity. He is known for his research on the language of Polari. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts.

Michael Henry 'Mick' Short is a British linguist. He is currently an honorary professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on applied linguistics with a special focus on stylistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keith Johnson (applied linguist)</span> British academic linguist

Keith Johnson is a British linguist. He is currently an emeritus professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on applied linguistics with a special focus on second language acquisition and language teaching.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CorCenCC</span> Welsh corpus

CorCenCC or the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh is a language resource for Welsh speakers, Welsh learners, Welsh language researchers, and anyone who is interested in the Welsh language. CorCenCC is a freely accessible collection of multiple language samples, gathered from real-life communication, and presented in the searchable online CorCenCC text corpus. The corpus is accompanied by an online teaching and learning toolkit – Y Tiwtiadur – which draws directly on the data from the corpus to provide resources for Welsh language learning at all ages and levels.

Jennifer Smith, PhD, FRSE is a sociolinguistic specialist in language variation and dialects, especially Scottish dialects across the generations and geography of Scotland, including developing the Scottish syntax atlas which analyses the diversity. Her research also covers variations in colonial English, for example, in North America. Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies, she teaches and researches language and variation theory.

References

  1. "Linguistics and English Language (LAEL)". lancs.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  2. "I was changing a nappy when call for help came". lancasterguardian.co.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  3. "The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS)". lancs.ac.uk. 30 March 2015. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  4. "Twitter rape threats and the discourse of online misogyny". gtr.ukri.org. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  5. "Claire Hardaker – CV – grants". lancs.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  6. "Comprehensive Policy Review of Anti-Trafficking Projects". ec.europa.eu. September 2016. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  7. "BBC Newsnight – The Twitter trolls who threaten rape – we try to catch one". BBC. 29 July 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  8. "BBC Radio 4 – Women's online misogyny". BBC. 14 August 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  9. "BBC – Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes". BBC. 23 May 2014. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  10. "Channel 4 to air Elliot Roger documentary, The Virgin Killer". channel4.com. 13 June 2014. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  11. "BBC – The Anti-Social Network". BBC. 6 February 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  12. "Tech Weekly Podcast 2013: Understanding the internet troll". theguardian.com. 10 July 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  13. "Tech Weekly Podcast 2014: Understanding the internet troll". theguardian.com. 8 October 2014. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  14. "The Naked Scientists: Are You Safe Online?". thenakedscientists.com. 22 August 2019. Retrieved 8 September 2019.
  15. "Brazil – Veja – Trolagem: a marca da maldade na web". veja.abril.com.br (in Portuguese). Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  16. "China – QQ – 《新政治家》杂志:铲除网络空间的"恶"". view.news.qq.com (in Chinese). Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  17. "The Netherlands – JOOP – Trollen doen het vooral uit verveling". joop.bnnvara.nl (in Dutch). Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  18. "Internet trolls face up to two years in jail under new laws". BBC. 18 October 2014. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  19. "Twitter Makes Tweaks To Limit Abuse And Abusers". techcrunch.com. 21 April 2015. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  20. Booth, Robert; Conlan, Tara (6 October 2014). "Sky News may face Ofcom inquiry after complaints over death of McCann 'troll'". theguardian.com. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  21. "The internet is often vile, but we can make it civilised". ft.com. 2 August 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  22. "Who are the trolls?". newstatesman.com. 29 July 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  23. "'Post-truth' declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries". BBC. 16 November 2016. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  24. "A dictionary to decipher kids' chat lingo". timesofindia.indiatimes.com. 12 September 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  25. "Parents baffled by children using 'noob' and 'tekkers' in online chat". The Daily Telegraph.co.uk. 10 September 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  26. "Derp, YOLO and Jank make it in to new dictionary". The Daily Telegraph. 12 September 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  27. "Reem! Two-thirds of parents confused by online slang". metro.co.uk. 11 September 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  28. "How the Voynich manuscript hit the headlines". historyextra.com. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  29. "Voynich code cracked?". languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  30. "Daily Hansard, Westminster Hall". 26 February 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  31. "The Guardian author profile – Claire Hardaker". theguardian.com. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  32. "The Independent author profile – Claire Hardaker". independent.co.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  33. "The Conversation author profile – Claire Hardaker". theconversation.com. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  34. "TWITTER: WHERE FREE SPEECH AND CENSORSHIP CAN BE SYNONYMS". psa.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  35. "Internet Pragmatics". benjamins.com. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  36. "Forensic Linguistics Research Group (FORGE)". wp.lancs.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  37. "Lancaster University's Linguistics & English Language Department Research Groups". lancs.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  38. "FireAnt: Filter, Identify, Report, and Export Analysis Toolkit". laurenceanthony.net. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  39. "en clair: forensic linguistics, literary detection, language mysteries, and more". podcasts.apple.com. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  40. "en clair: forensic linguistics, literary detection, language mysteries, and more – ways to listen". wp.lancs.ac.uk. November 2018. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
  41. "Royal approval for Lancaster University linguistics centre". thevisitor.co.uk. 2 March 2016. Retrieved 9 August 2019.

External sources

Faculty web page at Lancaster