Tune in to the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we explore how to measure something as abstract and slippery as uncertainty in political speech. Ella MacLaughlin, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, joins us to discuss her ongoing research on how politicians in the US, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands express uncertainty in public communication.
In this episode, we dive into the challenges of capturing uncertainty in political language, how it differs from other domains like biomedical science, and how we can build a dictionary for latent novel contracts.. Rather than focusing on results, we reflect on the conceptual and methodological puzzles that come with studying highly normative political language through computational tools.
Reach out to Ella at e.j.maclaughlin@uu.nl for more on her work, and check out the project website at radiunce.org!
A brief note from Ella: At 17:52, I mistakenly attributed a paper to ‘Walters’ instead of the correct author ‘Walker’. Apologies for the error.
What is it about computational communication science?