Integrating corpus-based, empirical, and computational methodologies
Speaker: Dr Themis Karaminis, City, University of London
Abstract
Press representations of autism and autistic people both reflect and help shape public attitudes towards autism and neurodiversity, and may establish critical barriers to social integration for autistic people.
In this talk, Dr Themis Karaminis will present results from a research project that studied the representation of autism in 10 national UK newspapers in the period 2011–2020.
Using a corpus of 18.7 million words from 23,742 documents, the project employed corpus-based critical discourse analysis, community-driven annotation, and computational linguistics, alongside a survey assessing public attitudes and reading preferences, the project explored the linguistic and semantic patterns associated with autism in British papers.
- What types of biases and stereotypes are prevalent in these portrayals?
- Is there evidence of progress over time?
- How do representations differ between broadsheets, tabloids, and politically left- versus right-leaning papers?
- What role does terminology, such as person-first versus identity-first language, play?
- To what extent does newspaper content influence implicit and explicit attitudes towards autistic people?
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