'Pauper aliens' and 'political refugees':A corpus linguistic approach to the language of migration in nineteenth-century newspapers

The widespread digitisation of their source base means that historians now face an overwhelming body of material. This historical ‘big data’ is only going to continue to expand, not just because digitisation features prominently on the agendas of institutions, but also because those studying late twentieth, and twenty-first century, history will have to deal with large quantities of ‘born digital’ material as they turn their gaze to the internet age. Although the interfaces currently used to access digital sources have their strengths, there is an increasing need for more effective ways for historians to work with large amounts of text. This thesis is one of the first studies to explore the potential of corpus linguistics, the computer-assisted analysis of language in very large bodies of text, as a means of approaching the ever-expanding historical archive. This thesis uses corpus linguistics to examine the representation of migrants in the British Library’s nineteenth-century newspaper collection, focusing specifically upon the discourses associated with ‘aliens’ and ‘refugees’, and how they changed over time. The nineteenth century saw an increase in global movement, which led to considerable legislative changes, including the development of many of Britain’s present-day migration controls. This thesis finds that ‘alien’ migration increased in topicality in the 1880s and 1890s and that ‘alien’ saw a striking shift in its associations that, significantly, coincided with an increase in, predominantly Jewish, migrants from the Russian Empire. Although only a small proportion of Britain’s ‘alien’ population, this group dominated newspaper reporting, which became characterised by increasingly negative language, including a strong association between the ‘alien’ and poverty. Although ‘refugee’ was often associated with more positive language than ‘alien’, this thesis finds that the actions of a small number of violent individuals influenced newspaper reporting upon political refugees, who became implicated in the alleged ‘abuse’ of the ‘right of asylum’

Counterfactual thinking about actions and failures to act

When people think counterfactually about how a situation could have turned out differently, they mentally undo events in regular ways (e.g., they focus on actions not failures to act). Four experiments examine the recent discovery that the focus on actions in the short term switches to inactions in the long term. The experiments show that this temporal switch occurs only for particular sorts of situations. Experiment 1 showed no temporal pattern to die agency effect when 112 participants judged emotional impact and frequency of "if-only " thoughts from both short- and long-term perspectives for an investment scenario. Experiment 2 showed no temporal pattern when 190 participants considered a college choice scenario with a good outcome. Experiment 3 showed no temporal pattern when 131 participants considered an investment scenario even when the situation for the actor and nonactor was bad from the outset. Experiment 4, with 113 participants, showed a focus on actions even when the investment loss was equal for both the actor and nonactor. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of what is explicitly available in the mental representation of actions and inactions. Counterfactual thinking about how factual situations may have been different occurs often in everyday thinking (e.g., Kahneman & Miller, 1986). People spontaneously think about how an outcom

The reflective labyrinth: An innovative tool for exploring, developing and scaffolding reflection skills at UCLan

Reflection is increasingly being embedded into higher education curricula, not only due to the benefits it has for long-term learning, but also due to it becoming a key requirement in professional competencies beyond the university context. However, due to assumptions that reflection is an innate ability already at students’ disposal, the necessary scaffolding of the thought processes involved are often overlooked. This study therefore aimed to demonstrate how the use of a labyrinth could stimulate and deepen the learning and teaching of critical reflection skills within UCLan. Reporting on initial findings from five labyrinth workshops with staff and students, this paper identified that both groups appreciated the wellbeing effect the labyrinth afforded, but differed in their evaluation of the sessions’ most valued quality. Whereas staff welcomed the opportunity, time and space to stop and reflect on their practice, students acknowledged the labyrinth’s effectiveness for learning about reflection, its models and its application to their assessments and practice. Potentially signalling their differing familiarity with the processes and goals of reflection, this study concluded that the labyrinth is a useful scaffolding tool for the learning and teaching of reflection which can be used across different subject areas, year groups and levels of expertise

Features of Explainability: How users understand counterfactual and causal explanations for categorical and continuous features in XAI

Counterfactual explanations are increasingly used to address interpretability, recourse, and bias in AI decisions. However, we do not know how well counterfactual explanations help users to understand a systems decisions, since no large scale user studies have compared their efficacy to other sorts of explanations such as causal explanations (which have a longer track record of use in rule based and decision tree models). It is also unknown whether counterfactual explanations are equally effective for categorical as for continuous features, although current methods assume they do. Hence, in a controlled user study with 127 volunteer participants, we tested the effects of counterfactual and causal explanations on the objective accuracy of users predictions of the decisions made by a simple AI system, and participants subjective judgments of satisfaction and trust in the explanations. We discovered a dissociation between objective and subjective measures: counterfactual explanations elicit higher accuracy of predictions than no-explanation control descriptions but no higher accuracy than causal explanations, yet counterfactual explanations elicit greater satisfaction and trust than causal explanations. We also found that users understand explanations referring to categorical features more readily than those referring to continuous features. We discuss the implications of these findings for current and future counterfactual methods in XAI.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, appendi

An Evaluation of the HEAR and DARE Supplementary Admission Routes to Higher Education

This evaluation stems from an interest from those working on and administering the HEAR and DARE schemes into the effectiveness of the schemes in widening participation in higher education of under-represented groups. A focus of Irish Higher Education (HE) policy is orientated toward the objective of promoting equality of access to higher education, with particular targeted initiatives for under-represented groups. There has been extensive research conducted in Ireland on the issue of Widening Participation (WP), including various evaluative reports on access initiatives of recent years. In addition, universities and colleges have at times undertaken substantial research on their own access programmes and students. However, just three studies to date have focused on the experiences of the HEAR and DARE cohorts, programmes which have been in place in their current format since just 2009. This evaluation seeks address the gap in our knowledge of HEAR and DARE. The DARE/HEAR Strategic Development Group (SDG) has commissioned us to evaluate the following: • To what extent do the schemes meet the target groups’ requirements? • How do the schemes contribute to the realisation of institutional and national targets? and • What can be determined about the sustainability, scaleability and replicability of the schemes? In terms of the data from which this evaluation is based, we adopt a mixed method approach, drawing on a range of existing administrative data sources collected by the HEAR and DARE schemes, the Central Applications Office (CAO) and the Higher Education Authority (HEA); alongside new qualitative data collection with HEAR and DARE students currently in higher education and a number of key internal and external stakeholders. The evaluation, in adopting a mixed method approach, draws on the strengths of these two methods to allow for a better understanding of the profile and experiences of school leavers who access the schemes

An Evaluation of the HEAR and DARE Supplementary Admission Routes to Higher Education

This evaluation stems from an interest from those working on and administering the HEAR and DARE schemes into the effectiveness of the schemes in widening participation in higher education of under-represented groups. A focus of Irish Higher Education (HE) policy is orientated toward the objective of promoting equality of access to higher education, with particular targeted initiatives for under-represented groups. There has been extensive research conducted in Ireland on the issue of Widening Participation (WP), including various evaluative reports on access initiatives of recent years. In addition, universities and colleges have at times undertaken substantial research on their own access programmes and students. However, just three studies to date have focused on the experiences of the HEAR and DARE cohorts, programmes which have been in place in their current format since just 2009. This evaluation seeks address the gap in our knowledge of HEAR and DARE. The DARE/HEAR Strategic Development Group (SDG) has commissioned us to evaluate the following: • To what extent do the schemes meet the target groups’ requirements? • How do the schemes contribute to the realisation of institutional and national targets? and • What can be determined about the sustainability, scaleability and replicability of the schemes? In terms of the data from which this evaluation is based, we adopt a mixed method approach, drawing on a range of existing administrative data sources collected by the HEAR and DARE schemes, the Central Applications Office (CAO) and the Higher Education Authority (HEA); alongside new qualitative data collection with HEAR and DARE students currently in higher education and a number of key internal and external stakeholders. The evaluation, in adopting a mixed method approach, draws on the strengths of these two methods to allow for a better understanding of the profile and experiences of school leavers who access the schemes

Non-invasive methods of identifying and tracking wild squid

The ability to identify individual free-living animals in the field is an important method for studying their behavior. Apart from invasive external or internal tags, which may cause injury or abnormal behavior, most cephalopods cannot be tagged, as their skin is too soft and delicate for tag retention. Additionally, cephalopods remove many types of tags. However, body markings have been successfully used as a non invasive method to identify individuals of many different species of animals, including whale sharks, grey whales, seals, and zebras. We developed methods to sex and individually identify Caribbean reef squid, Sepiotheuthis sepioidea. Males showed distinct bright dots on their fins on a Basic Brown background and have a light line at the fin edge while the females had a gradual transition from Brown to Pale towards the edge of their fins without showing distinct fin-dots or lines. In the field we used four characters to distinguish individual S. sepioidea from each other – sex, relative size to each other, scars, and patterns of light-colored dots on their mantles and fins. These dot patterns are individually unique and constant in location through time. Observations in the field were backed up by an image database using illustrations and photography

Non-invasive methods of identifying and tracking wild squid

The ability to identify individual free-living animals in the field is an important method for studying their behavior. Apart from invasive external or internal tags, which may cause injury or abnormal behavior, most cephalopods cannot be tagged, as their skin is too soft and delicate for tag retention. Additionally, cephalopods remove many types of tags. However, body markings have been successfully used as a non invasive method to identify individuals of many different species of animals, including whale sharks, grey whales, seals, and zebras. We developed methods to sex and individually identify Caribbean reef squid, Sepiotheuthis sepioidea. Males showed distinct bright dots on their fins on a Basic Brown background and have a light line at the fin edge while the females had a gradual transition from Brown to Pale towards the edge of their fins without showing distinct fin-dots or lines. In the field we used four characters to distinguish individual S. sepioidea from each other – sex, relative size to each other, scars, and patterns of light-colored dots on their mantles and fins. These dot patterns are individually unique and constant in location through time. Observations in the field were backed up by an image database using illustrations and photography