Reading Animals: An International English Studies Conference 17–20 July, 2014
I'll be giving a paper related to the 'People, Products, Pests and Pets' project at this conference, which you can read more about at their website: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/animal/readinganimals. This is the abstract for the talk I'll be giving:
‘His Labor is a Chant, / His Idleness a Tune’: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Representations of the Bee in News Media
The multiple ways in which animals are represented in a variety of discourses has become an increasingly urgent question in the light of global climate change. This new context for reading animals and their relationship to society has thrown into relief society’s dependence on animals to realise a range of physical and psychological needs. This paper makes use of the tools offered by the use of computerised methods for the linguistic analysis of large bodies of texts, known as “corpus linguistics”, to examine these relationships using the case study of the bee in UK newspapers. Contemporary discourse about bees exemplifies this dependence on the animal, providing a nexus for considering a variety of positions toward them. Their potential disappearance threatens widespread impact on food production, paralleling concerns over the risk to the food industry caused by climate change. Analysis of samples of the discourse produced by institutions can reveal the ways in which the human relationship to the bee is imagined and written about in the UK in the last twenty years. This paper presents the ongoing work of a Leverhulme funded collaboration between researchers at King’s College London and The University of Birmingham. It will present findings on the ways in which the bee has been written about in news media. Corpus linguistics will aid in identifying patterns of language specific to this particular genre of discourse, along with those patterns that reach beyond their appearance within a circumscribed domain. Several corpus-based methodologies offer ways to approach this examination, including collocations, keyness and concordances; this paper will present the results of these analyses. It will use this quantitative analysis to support a qualitative examination of the relationships that are represented, deploying critical discourse analysis to consider their salient characteristics. Ultimately, this paper shows how the tools offered by corpus linguistics can ground an examination of the human representation of and relationships to bees, findings that offer the potential for informing further interdisciplinary research on animals.
