Book chapters by Elena Nichele
Doing Politics. Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 2018
This chapter examines the representation of the slogan "Je Suis Charlie" (JSC) on Wikipedia. Draw... more This chapter examines the representation of the slogan "Je Suis Charlie" (JSC) on Wikipedia. Drawing on corpus tools in addition to purely qualitative analytical tools led to the identification of several themes that recur throughout Wikipedia's article on JSC as well as on the associated discussion pages. The Wikipedia article represents JSC as a globally-used symbol of freedom of speech and solidarity with victims of specific violent events. On the discussion pages, JSC receives a markedly different treatment, e.g. the debates focus on whether JSC - rather than symbolising freedom of speech - symbolises the freedom to discriminate against groups of people. Furthermore, the discussions focus on JSC as uniting the "West" only and not on JSC as a global phenomenon.
Papers by Elena Nichele
Personal and ubiquitous computing, May 21, 2024
ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot system by OpenAI, gained significant attention and adoption in 2... more ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot system by OpenAI, gained significant attention and adoption in 2022 and 2023. By generating human-like conversations, it attracted over 100 million monthly users; however, there are concerns about the social impact of ChatGPT, including panic, misinformation and ethics. Twitter has become a platform for expressing views on ChatGPT and popular NLP approaches like topic modelling, sentiment analysis and emotion detection are commonly used to study public discourses on Twitter. While these approaches have limitations, an analytical process of existing best practices captures the evolving nature of these views. Previous studies have examined early reactions and topics associated with ChatGPT on Twitter but have not fully explored the combination of topics, sentiment and emotions, nor have they explicitly followed existing best practices. This study provides an overview of the views expressed on Twitter about ChatGPT by analysing 88,058 tweets from November 2022 to March 2023 to see if panic and concern were replicated in Twitter discourses. The topics covered human-like text generation, chatbot development, writing assistance, data training, efficiency, impact on business and cryptocurrency. Overall, the sentiment was predominantly positive, indicating that concerns surrounding ChatGPT were not widely replicated. However, sentiment fluctuated, with a decline observed around the launch of ChatGPT Plus. The discourse saw consistent patterns of trust and fear, with trust maintaining a steady presence until a decline potentially influenced by concerns about biases and misinformation. We discuss how our findings build upon existing research regarding ChatGPT by providing trajectories of topics, sentiment and emotions.
Journal of Medical Internet Research, Jun 28, 2023
SN Social Sciences, Aug 22, 2023
In July 2021, the UK recorded an increase in self-isolation notifications to the users of the NHS... more In July 2021, the UK recorded an increase in self-isolation notifications to the users of the NHS Covid-19 contact-tracing app. The term pingdemic was coined and used widely in the media to refer to this period of increased notifications. Whilst existing research on language evolution during Covid-19 focuses on the negative connotations of the term pandemic, little attention has been dedicated yet to the connotations of the term pingdemic. Thus, this study contributes a comparison between the semantic prosody of pingdemic and its benchmark pandemic, through the corpus analysis of 628 UK printed newspaper articles, published during the peak in notifications to add to the increasing knowledge of how the pandemic evolved in the UK and how AI has had an impact on it. With the aid of the Sketch Engine, through the analysis of keywords, collocations and Word Sketch Difference visualisations, we found that pingdemic held a more negative semantic prosody than pandemic.
Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems
Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems
PLOS ONE
In August 2020, the UK government and regulation body Ofqual replaced school examinations with au... more In August 2020, the UK government and regulation body Ofqual replaced school examinations with automatically computed A Level grades in England and Wales. This algorithm factored in school attainment in each subject over the previous three years. Government officials initially stated that the algorithm was used to combat grade inflation. After public outcry, teacher assessment grades used instead. Views concerning who was to blame for this scandal were expressed on the social media website Twitter. While previous work used NLP-based opinion mining computational linguistic tools to analyse this discourse, shortcomings included accuracy issues, difficulties in interpretation and limited conclusions on who authors blamed. Thus, we chose to complement this research by analysing 18,239 tweets relating to the A Level algorithm using Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), underpinned by social actor representation. We examined how blame was attributed to different e...
BACKGROUND Since September 2020, the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app has been used to mitigate t... more BACKGROUND Since September 2020, the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app has been used to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in the UK. Since its launch, this app has been part of the discussion regarding the perceived social agency of decision-making algorithms. On the social media website Twitter, a plethora of views about the app have been found but only analysed for sentiment and topic trajectories thus far, leaving the perceived social agency of the app underexplored. OBJECTIVE We aimed to examine the discussion of social agency in social media public discourse regarding algorithmic-operated decisions, particularly when the AI agency responsible for specific information systems is not openly disclosed in an example such as the Covid-19 contact tracing app. To do this, we analysed the presentation of the NHS Covid-19 App on Twitter, focusing on the portrayal of social agency and the impact of its deployment on society. We also aimed to discover what the presentation of social agents c...
Medical Humanities
Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key ... more Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily COVID-19 updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official government COVID-19 updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvemen...
Applied Corpus Linguistics
SN Social Sciences
The original article has been corrected. The authors' affiliations have been correctly updated.
PLOS ONE
During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital contact-tracing has been employed in many countries to moni... more During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital contact-tracing has been employed in many countries to monitor and manage the spread of the disease. However, to be effective such a system must be adopted by a substantial proportion of the population; therefore, public trust plays a key role. This paper examines the NHS COVID-19 smartphone app, the digital contact-tracing solution in the UK. A series of interviews were carried out prior to the app’s release (n = 12) and a large scale survey examining attitudes towards the app (n = 1,001) was carried out after release. Extending previous work reporting high level attitudes towards the app, this paper shows that prevailing negative attitudes prior to release persisted, and affected the subsequent use of the app. They also show significant relationships between trust, app features, and the wider social and societal context. There is lower trust amongst non-users of the app and trust correlates to many other aspects of the app, a lack of trust cou...
Journal of Medical Internet Research
Background Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have been implemented as a response to the COVID-19... more Background Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have been implemented as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Research has focused on understanding acceptance and adoption of these apps, but more work is needed to understand the factors that may contribute to their sustained use. This is key to public health because DCT apps require a high uptake rate to decrease the transmission of the virus within the general population. Objective This study aimed to understand changes in the use of the National Health Service Test & Trace (T&T) COVID-19 DCT app and explore how public trust in the app evolved over a 1-year period. Methods We conducted a longitudinal mixed methods study consisting of a digital survey in December 2020 followed by another digital survey and interview in November 2021, in which responses from 9 participants were explored in detail. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview transcripts. This paper focuses on the thematic analysis to unpack the reasoning behind ...
Lancaster University, Jan 15, 2016
Introduction to the volume……………………………………………………………..………i Code-switching and social identity constr... more Introduction to the volume……………………………………………………………..………i Code-switching and social identity construction among Arabic-English bilinguals: A stance perspective………………………………………………………………………...…1
SN Social Sciences
Digital platforms for mental health and wellbeing purposes have become increasingly common to hel... more Digital platforms for mental health and wellbeing purposes have become increasingly common to help users exhibiting risk behaviours (e.g. self-harming, eating-related disorders) across all ages, opening new frontiers in supporting vulnerable users. This study stems from a larger project, which explores how responsible AI solutions can up-scale existing manual moderation approaches and better target interventions for young people who ask for help or engage in risk behaviours online. This research aims to better understand the challenges and needs of moderators and digital counsellors, i.e. the ‘behind the scenes’. Through this case study, the authors intend to contribute to the development of responsible AI tools that are fit for purpose and better understand the challenges. The key focus lies on Kooth.com, the UK’s leading free online confidential service offering counselling and emotional wellbeing support to young people in the UK through its online web-based and pseudo-anonymous ...
Journal of Responsible Technology
BACKGROUND Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have been recently implemented widely as a response... more BACKGROUND Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have been recently implemented widely as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Research has focused on understanding the acceptance and adoption of these apps, but more work is needed to understand which factors may contribute to sustained use of the app. This is key in public health due to DCT apps needing a high uptake rate to decrease transmission of the virus within the general population. OBJECTIVE To understand changes in use of the NHS Test & Trace (T&T) Covid-19 DCT app and to explore how public trust in the app evolved over a one-year period. METHODS A longitudinal mixed-methods approach was conducted consisting of a digital survey in December 2020 followed by another digital survey and interview in November 2021 in which survey responses from 9 participants were explored in detail. Thematic analysis was used to analyse interview transcripts. This paper focuses on the thematic analysis of the qualitative data to unpack the reason...
In this part of the study, we analyse the language of speeches about COVID-19 delivered by Boris ... more In this part of the study, we analyse the language of speeches about COVID-19 delivered by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 3rd March 2020 and 5th April 2021. We use transcribed speeches to construct a digitised body of texts called a corpus (plural 'corpora') that we analyse linguistically. This approach, 'corpus linguistics' uses specialist software to identify common patterns that occur in language, including the frequency and usage of specific words. The results reported here will further inform our investigation of the reception and evaluation of public health messaging and related measures which are of key concerns to our project
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Book chapters by Elena Nichele
Papers by Elena Nichele