Dr Clare Llewellyn

Clare is interested in the development and definition of cross-disciplinary methodological and ethical techniques and standards in the GovTech domain. She has extensive experience in working in a collaborative trans-disciplinary environment and has produced co-authored papers with academics from informatics, politics, social work, history, botany, criminology, linguistics, information studies and library science. More recently, she has specialised in collaborating with social scientist and has been embedded in a trans-disciplinary lab where she has expanded and exploited her unique combination of skills.

Specifically, Clare has developed novel data analysis techniques, underpinned by data science technologies such as natural language processing, supervised and unsupervised machine learning and statistical analysis. Her recent focus has been in developing and implementing studies to gather and analyse social media data and in using these results either in combination with, or as an underpinning for, experimental and quantitative social science research. Her work in this area is unique as she uses a longitudinal multiple aspect collection approach to gathering social media data. This involves gathering several parallel datasets over extended time periods allowing the observation of changes, the ability to map to changes in data to changes in public opinion and enables analysis from multiple viewpoints.

Clare has accumulated what is probably the largest corpus of Brexit-related tweets currently available. The scale of this datapresents significant storage, processing and visualisation issues that she responds to with innovative methodological solutions. She has used this data to answer political questions that give a real-world impact. These questions have included: Can we determine if it was social media that popularise the Vote Leave campaign message that we should “take back control of £350 Million to spend on the NHS”? Were Russian Twitter Trolls designed to influence the US 2016 Presidential Elections active in the Brexit debate? Where did the supporters of Tommy Robinson, the former English Defence League leader claim to be located? Was the 2017 General Election Twitter conversation dominated by discussion of politicians or substantial issues?

For more information please see Clare's profile page here.