Subject Area: Medieval English literature
Supervisor: Professor Liz McAvoy, Dr Roberta Magnani
Research Degree: PhD
Thesis Title: Floral Utopias and Otherworlds: Representations of the hortus conclusus in Chaucer and his contemporaries
The PhD will analyse a corpus of online grooming interactions (~3 m words), facilitated by the Perverted Justice Foundation, a non-profit organisation that employs decoys, pretending to be children online and engaging in interactions (recorded as chat logs), which are uploaded after the groomer is convicted. A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach will be used to analyse quantitatively and qualitatively the language of online groomers. Sub-corpora will be defined based on different durations of grooming and a sub-set of the data will be defined to carry out a discourse analysis.
The PhD will be the first to examine how the overall duration of online grooming affects the language used and which key words and semantic domains groomers typically use. Answers to these pressing questions will provide new academic insights into the communicative tactics regularly used by online groomers and pointers for progressing stakeholder work geared towards online grooming prevention and detection.
Lorenzo-Dus, N., Walker, L. and Kinzel, A. (2017). The Role of Discourse Analysis in Terrorism Studies: Comparing Inspire and Dabiq. In Conway, M., Jarvis, L., Lehane, O., MacDonald, S. and Nouri, L. (Eds.) Terrorists’ Use of the Internet (158-169).
Lorenzo-Dus, N., Kinzel, A. and Walker, L. (2018). Representing the West and “non-believers” in the online jihadist magazines Dabiq and Inspire. Critical Studies on Terrorism. Doi: 10.1080/17539153.2018.1471081
