Life and Language

Gavin Brookes provides insights into the language that people use when they talk about dementia. Language plays an important part in making sense of a health condition. In this episode we cover a wide range of topics - from stigma tohumour. Gavin has some very concrete messages for all of us - whether you have lived experience of dementia, work in social care, or do not know that much about the condition yet.

Dr Gavin Brookes is a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University (UK). His research uses corpus linguistic, critical and multimodal approaches to discourse analysis in order to examine how language and image are used to representhealth and illness. He is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and Co-Editor of the BloomsburyCorpus and Discourse book series.

In this episode, I chat to Lauren Tilton about digital humanities and the ways we can teach AI to view the world. Distant viewing is a theory and method for how computer vision works. It enables a critical view of the social, political, and cultural values and beliefs that are built into computer visionsystems. You will also learn about digital humanities morewidely. And if you want to get the Distant Viewer Explorer that’s mention in the episode, you find that here

Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor ofLiberal Arts and Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond. She is the author (togetherwith Taylor Arnold) of Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images. MIT Press (2023).

Lauren Tilton is the Constituent Organisation Board (COB) President of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).  

Don’t we all love it when we visit places that we know from stories in books and films?

In the first episode of Season 5, my guest is the wonderful Lee Jackson. We are talking about his book ‘Dickensland’ and literary tourism.

Lee Jackson takes us to places that Dickens’s writing has brought into the public imagination. Some of them are more real than others, but all of them are exciting!

Today’s world is in much need of change. But what can we do as individuals and as a society? And how can we bring a humanities perspectives to the change that the world needs? Who better to talk to than Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of the book “We are free to change the world”. Lyndsey refers to her book a "critical creative biography of Hannah Arendt". It is very topical in the way it helps us to think about our troubled political times.

Have you given Victorian gothic fiction a try? The Fascination by Essie Fox will certainly be a good one to get you started. It is a novel that takes you to the Victorian country fairgrounds, the glamour of the Drury Lane pantomimes, and a museum in London’s Oxford Street filled with anatomical wonders. It is a story about belonging and finding your family. In this episode, I talk to Essie about her novel, but also about the craft of writing historical fiction, the very practical challenges of navigating the expectations of sales and marketing, and the research that is part of the creative process.  

Essie Fox is a member of the Historical Writers Association,

Charles Dickens has captured the public imagination like no other. What always fascinates me about him and his work is how fiction and reality intersect. In this episode, I talk to Pete Orford to get his take on the relationship between lived experience and literary examples in the world of Charles Dickens. Pete has recently published the book The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens, which gives us plenty of fascinating examples to talk about.

Pete Orford is the Course Director of the MA in Charles Dickens Studies run by the University of Buckingham and the Charles Dickens Museum in London. He is the author of The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ Unfinished Novel & Our Endless Attempts to End It, and the editor of Pictures from Italy for the Oxford Dickens.

What makes the First Folio so important and unique? 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the first published collection of Shakespeare’s

Chris Laoutaris is associate professor at The Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. He is a biographer, historian & a poet. Shakespeare's

How do you become a successful children’s author? I invited the brilliant Hannah Gold so I could learn

And guess what song Hannah likes to start events with?  Well, I do like Katy Perry, too!

Hannah Gold’s first book, The Last Bear – won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2022 and the same year also the Blue Peter Book Award. Her second book The Lost Whale was the Winner of the Edward Stanford Children's Book of the Year 2023.

Can the law be the same if the language is different? I invited Karen McAuliffe, an expert in multilingual law, to shed some light on this question. Different languages represent reality in different ways. This has an impact on the legal system,

Karen McAuliffe is Professor of Law and Language at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the relationship between law, language and translation in multilingual legal orders, particularly the European Union. She has run a number of large, funded, research projects in the field of law and language, including the Law and Language at the European Court of Justice project and The EU Case Law Corpus project. You can find out more about Karen’s research on her website: www.karenmcauliffe.com

Here are some links to the things mentioned in this episode:

Jessica Whyte (2014) The Fortunes of Natural Man:

Karen McAuliffe (2013), The Limitations of a

Legal Recognition of Sign Languages Project

Are you be able to spot fake news? Can you even define what fake news is? According to Jack Grieve, ‘fake news’ is deceptive, it is intentionally trying to misinform its audience. Fake news is not the same as news that is untrue or false. But what exactly makes news fake? Are there any linguistic clues? Anything that gives away the intention to deceive? Can linguistic methods help us to find out? Surely there is lots of fake news out there that can serve as a data set for

Jack Grieve is a Professor of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the quantitative analysis of language variation and change.