Matt Gee

Research Fellow in Linguistics

School of English

Email:: matt.gee@bcu.ac.uk

Matt Gee works in the field of Corpus Linguistics, developing research and teaching tools as a member of the Research and Development Unit for English Studies. This includes the WebCorp suite of online search and analysis tools, which are designed to treat the web as a source of linguistic data. WebCorp Live refines the results returned by commercial web search engines, presenting them in a manner suitable for linguistic study. It is used by teachers, researchers and translators around the world. WebCorp LSE provides access to pre-processed web-corpora for Corpus Linguistic analysis (including wildcard and part-of-speech search, concordancing, collocation, and time-series analysis). It is now being tested for use in teaching by English language learners under the name WebCorp Learn.

Matt developed a tool for online collaborative annotation called eMargin. eMargin is a web-based tool that replicates the practice of close reading by allowing the annotation and discussion of digital texts. eMargin is used by educational institutions of all levels for literature studies, language learning, literary skills development, linguistic annotation and humanities research. It is also used outside of education, for example in the discussion of policy documents by political groups.

As part of the TRAC:COVID project, Matt developed an online dashboard combining text analysis methods with data visualisation to assist users from a variety of backgrounds in interpreting a large dataset of tweets. The project investigated the online conversation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic from a linguistic perspective, examining the clarity and reception of official messaging and the trustworthiness of information sources.

As a continuation of his research into tools and methods to support linguistic analysis, Matt developed XTranscript. XTranscript is an online tool to convert transcripts encoded with Conversational Analysis notation into XML. The resulting XML can then be subjected to quantitative analysis using mature XML processing technologies, such as XPath and XQuery.

In his recent research, Matt has used automated methods to study topic and user interactions on web-forums, cultural and sociolinguistic phenomena on Twitter, and lexical and semantic change in online news. He is also working on a visualisation tool for the analysis of open-text questions in surveys, with a focus on the National Student Survey.

Qualifications

Research

Postgraduate Supervision

Publications

(forthcoming). “There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature. Linguistics Vanguard.

2022 with Renouf, A & Kehoe, A. A data-driven approach to finding significant changes in language use through time series analysis. In Flach, S. & Hilpert, M. (eds.) Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics: New approaches to variability and change, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 284-317. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.105.10keh

2022 with Tkacukova, T. Morton, R. The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 35, 1733–1759. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09870-6

2021 with Malik, S., Ryder, M., Marsden, S. & Lawson, R. ‘BAME’: A report on the use of the term and responses to it: Terminology Review for the BBC and Creative Industries. Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/creativediversity/bame-terminology-review/

2021 with Tkacukova, T., McGlashan, M., Kehoe, A. & Lawson, R. TRAC:COVID Case Study Reports. https://traccovid.com/traccovid/reports. Submitted to House of Commons Report Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/6954/documents/73046/default/

2021 with Carter, P., McIlhone, H., Lally, H. & Lawson, R. Comparing manual and computational approaches to theme identification in online forums: A case study of a sex work special interest community. Methods in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metip.2021.100065

2019 with Kehoe, A. “Thanks for the donds”: A corpus linguistic analysis of topic-based communities in the comment section of The Guardia. In U. Lutzky & M. Nevala (eds.) Reference and Identity in Public Discourses, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 127-158.

2019 with Rühlemann, C & Ptak, A. Alternating gaze in multi-party storytelling. Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 149, 91-113.

2018 with Rühlemann, C. Conversation Analysis and the XML method. Gesprächsforschung [Discourse and Conversation Analysis], Volume 18.

2018 with Lutzky, L. 'I just found your blog'. The Pragmatics of initiating comments on blog posts. Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 129, 173-184.

2013 with Kehoe, A. eMargin: A Collaborative Textual Annotation Tool. Ariadne, Issue 71.

2012 with Kehoe, A. Reader comments as an aboutness indicator in online texts: introducing the Birmingham Blog Corpus. In S. Oksefjell Ebeling, J. Ebeling and H. Hasselgård (eds.) Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English Volume 12: Aspects of Corpus Linguistics: Compilation, Annotation, Analysis, University of Helsinki e-journal.

2011 with Kehoe, A. Social Tagging: A new perspective on textual 'aboutness'. In P. Rayson, S. Hoffmann and G. Leech (eds.) Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English Volume 6: Methodological and Historical Dimensions of Corpus Linguistics, University of Helsinki e-journal.

2009 with Kehoe, A. Weaving web data into a diachronic corpus patchwork. In A. Renouf and A. Kehoe (eds.) Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 255-279.

2007 with Kehoe, A. New corpora from the web: making web text more 'text-like'. In Pahta, P., I. Taavitsainen, T. Nevalainen and J. Tyrkkö (eds.) Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies, University of Helsinki e-journal.