CFP: From Text to Political Positions 2010

AMSTERDAM WORKSHOP - Political Text Analysis

9-10 April 2010, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

http://www2.let.vu.nl/oz/cltl/t2pp/index.html

 

Plenary speakers:

Kenneth Benoit (Trinity College, Dublin, Dept of Political Science)

Jan Kleinnijenhuis (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Dept of Communication Studies and The Network Institute)

Veronika Koller (Lancaster University, Dept of Linguistics and English Language) and Paul Davidson (University of Bradford, Department of Peace Studies)

Janyce Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh, Dept of Computer Science).

The workshop ‘From Text to Political Positions´ (T2PP) is intended to provide a meeting place for individual researchers and research groups focussing on the development of methods and techniques for the analysis of political texts. It will allow for dialogue between scholars working on complementary multidisciplinary projects, and so may lead to further collaboration. During these two days, plenty of time will be reserved for social and intellectual exchanges and the event will close with a round-table discussion.

The meeting will focus on comprehensive and precise methods for manual and automated analysis of subjectivity and the presentation of opinions in political texts.  Examples of relevant text-types include, but are not limited to: television news broadcasts, interviews, newspapers, opinion papers, parliamentary debates, manifestos, party websites, blogs, public-opinion polls on the internet and voting polls and election results.  Topic suggestions include:

  • Modelling positions of actors in political texts on issues and dimensions
  • Sociological and linguistic models for deep-structure analysis of political texts
  • Linguistic evidence of popularisation of language in politics
  • Politics in the media: methods of analysis in media discourse on politics
  • Securing quality in quantitative research methods
  • Analysing political discourse from a regional (e.g., European, Asian, African, British, USA) or global perspective
  • Acquisition and representation of subjectivity and modality (emotion, deontic and epistemic modality, urgency) as expressed lexically (e.g. ‘good/bad', ‘for/against', ‘can/will/should/must/shall', ‘say/state/assume/demand', pos./neg. ‘possible/likely') or on a higher discourse level.
  • The automatic annotation of subjective, deontic and modal layers of implications in texts to model complex opinions and positions of actors
  • Applications for political opinion mining and positioning tools
  • ... other suggestions are welcome

We invite word abstracts in English. They should be sent to

-- Deadline for abstracts: 29 January 2010

-- Notification of acceptance will be made by February 15th.

-- Participation will be based upon acceptance of refereed abstracts.

-- Only a limited number of papers (12-16) can be accepted to allow for 20 minutes per paper plus discussion time.

-- Deadline for papers from accepted participants: 10 March 2010

-- Accepted papers will be posted on the T2PP web site two weeks in advance as 'working papers' to enhance discussion and debate.

-- We plan to compile a selection of the papers and submit them to a peer-reviewed international journal for publication as a special issue.

Workshop cost: FREE - There will be no registration fee!

Published 13/01/2010