Methods Sessions

Following on from the successful series of online methods sessions in 2020-21, Methods North West is offering another series of methodological sessions during 2021/22, once again delivered by experts in their fields. A list of all previous sessions can be found in our archive here.

Please find details of upcoming sessions below:

12th May 2022, 2-3pm

Hour ahead stock price forecasting: A comparative analysis of machine learning and deep learning models for high frequency financial time-series data

Robina Iqbal (Keele University)

Tabular neural networks handle categorical and continuous columns differently as compared to other algorithms such as Random Forest. This study set out to investigate the efficacy of Tabular Learner (TL) and evaluated their performance with LSTM, GRU and Random Forest models in making one hour ahead prediction of stock prices. fastsai’s TL was used for training while a strategic validation approach for time-series analysis was implemented.

19th May 2022, 2-3pm

Diverse economies: anticapitalocentric, hopeful reading for better worlds

Pete North (University of Liverpool)

This seminar will examine methods for uncovering and developing better worlds, and thinking about more hopeful ontologies as developed by scholars associated with the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham. How can we uncover and develop better stories, visions practices about how we and others can live well in the Anthropocene, What methods are used by diverse economies scholars to build better worlds?

26th May 2022, 2-3pm

Metaphors of menopause and how to analyse them

Pernille Bogø-Jørgensen (Lancaster University)

Metaphor is a slippery linguistic phenomenon and much discussion has gone into developing rules for how to identify it. A current practice is the well-tested Metaphor Identification Procedure, MIP, (Pragglejaz, 2007) and its further development MIPVU (Steen et al, 2010), which is replicable across several languages (see Nacey et al. 2019).

Replicability comes at the cost of restrictiveness as does any procedure that seeks to make qualitative data countable. However, in my research it functions as a starting point for a discussion about what metaphor is. This talk will address how I have applied MIP to my data as well as made it complement the metaphor scenarios theory proposed by Musolff (2006). Metaphor scenarios are ‘mini-narratives’ that set out possibilities, expectations and evaluations for actors and their actions.

In my data, this relates to menopause as it is construed in Danish and US American medical websites and women’s magazines. My aim is to contribute to a broader discussion about triangulation of methods to analyse metaphor in natural language.

9th June 2022, 2-3pm

Discovery-led approaches in the digital archive; finding resonances with literature; and researching at a distance during the pandemic

Roslyn Irving (University of Liverpool)

Archives are filled with voices of the past, waiting to be uncovered, and a discovery-based approach offers the flexibility to engage with these texts and allow them to take the lead. During my master’s research, I visited special collections. I could physically touch the materials and turn delicate pages. In essence, materials from the early twentieth-century were tangible to me. My PhD research, which began in the midst of the pandemic, has been a very different experience. As physical archives became inaccessible, the digital archive became my doorway into the eighteenth-century. This session addresses the complexities of undertaking archival research and what I have learned using digitised texts. It will also consider how to filter and select sources and find resonances between historical documents and literature.

16th June 2022, 2-3pm

Post-structuralist approaches to critical discourse analysis: A hybrid approach

Camila Montiel McCann (University of Liverpool)

This talk will offer insight into how to incorporate marginalised voices into your research and how to decentralise the perspective of the researcher as the omniscient authority on a topic. Using my own research into the representation of women in the news media, I will explain how I supplement a more straightforward critical discourse analytical approach with a poststructuralist analysis in order to provide self-reflexivity in my research and re-centre the voices of those who I study. Though based on feminist approaches to language and gender, this talk is relevant to those doing qualitative research who want to take steps towards a more intersectional, decolonised methodology and inclusive, collaborative research.

30th June 2022, 2-3pm

Studying Violence: Concepts, Approaches and Challenges

Deana Heath (University of Liverpool)

What do we mean by the term ‘violence’ – does it include, for example, famine, social suffering, or the intergenerational effects of postcolonial trauma – and how do we theorise it? What are some of the ways, moreover, that we can go about studying it, and what sorts of challenges might we encounter when we do? This workshop will focus on some of the challenges of carrying out research on violence and suggest some potential ways to address these.