Dr Zsófia Demjén
banner
zsofiademjen.bsky.social
Dr Zsófia Demjén
@zsofiademjen.bsky.social
Associate Professor at UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics (she).
Language & illness: vaccination, psychosis, cancer, depression | humor, metaphor, (im)politeness, pronouns, negation, narrative, corpus linguistics
Pinned
New short paper out in Public Health: 'A jab is not a vaccine; it's a 'shot'
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A jab is not a vaccine; it's a ‘shot’
Previous work identified a new type of vaccine scepticism on social media centred around questioning the status of the COVID-19 vaccine as a vaccine, …
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Our book 'Applying Corpus Linguistics to Illness and Healthcare' is out open access! We wrote it to share what we learnt in many years of research in @corpussocialsci.bsky.social, on topics such as communication about anxiety, dementia, cancer, obesity and vaccines. cambridgeblog.org/2025/08/appl...
Applying Corpus Linguistics to Illness and Healthcare
This book has been fun and also somewhat liberating to write. To explain this we have to tell the story of how the book came about.
cambridgeblog.org
September 25, 2025 at 8:38 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Making science songs

I wrote what follows in 2012. Now it's 2021, I can't believe it, and we are living in a time when science has become a matter of survival. We are living through the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines have been developed at speed to help us get out of this mess. Music and songs…
Making science songs
I wrote what follows in 2012. Now it's 2021, I can't believe it, and we are living in a time when science has become a matter of survival. We are living through the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines have been developed at speed to help us get out of this mess. Music and songs have helped us along the way, just like science.
makingsciencepublic.com
July 28, 2025 at 7:33 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Congratulations to Dr @bethmalory.bsky.social on being named a BBC New Generation Thinker 2025. Dr Malory will join five other early career researchers to shape programming on BBC Radio 4, bringing new ideas to audiences www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/ju...
‪@uclenglishusage.bsky.social ‪@ukri.org‬
Academic named a BBC 2025 New Generation Thinker
Dr Beth Malory (UCL English) will join five other early career researchers chosen by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to shape programming on BBC Radio 4, bringing new ideas...
www.ucl.ac.uk
June 20, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on.

slate.com/technology/2...
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.
slate.com
June 19, 2025 at 4:22 PM
New short paper out in Public Health: 'A jab is not a vaccine; it's a 'shot'
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A jab is not a vaccine; it's a ‘shot’
Previous work identified a new type of vaccine scepticism on social media centred around questioning the status of the COVID-19 vaccine as a vaccine, …
www.sciencedirect.com
June 9, 2025 at 1:17 PM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Spotted in the wild:

An advance copy of The Literary Lifeline, showcasing bibliotherapy in action!

Out in July, this insightful book is a tribute to the transporting and consoling power of reading:
Bloomsbury.com/literary-lifeline-9781472583604/
May 7, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Happy to share the rarest of things these days: an ad for a permanent full-time lectureship in linguistics:

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise in Language Teaching and Technology.
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
www.ucl.ac.uk
May 12, 2025 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
We're looking for UK men aged 40-65 to give us some paid feedback on a video featuring 2 men talking about experiences of #suicidal thoughts. We want to know if it will be helpful for other men, even if they have never felt suicidal. Up to 1 hour of your time to help in our #suicideprevention work.
May 6, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
"Scale isn't a substitute for scrutiny" resonates with Schegloff's (1993) "quantification is no substitute for analysis” (p. 114) in conversation analysis #EMCA
The larger the dataset, the larger the false sense of confidence - if bias is baked in, size just makes a flawed measurement more convincing.

Xiao-Li Meng has called it the big data paradox: 'The bigger the data, the surer we fool ourselves.'

In other words, scale isn’t a substitute for scrutiny.
Statistical paradises and paradoxes in big data (I): Law of large populations, big data paradox, and the 2016 US presidential election
Statisticians are increasingly posed with thought-provoking and even paradoxical questions, challenging our qualifications for entering the statistical paradises created by Big Data. By developing measures for data quality, this article suggests a framework to address such a question: “Which one should I trust more: a 1% survey with 60% response rate or a self-reported administrative dataset covering 80% of the population?” A 5-element Euler-formula-like identity shows that for any dataset of size $n$, probabilistic or not, the difference between the sample average $\overline{X}_{n}$ and the population average $\overline{X}_{N}$ is the product of three terms: (1) a data quality measure, $\rho_{{R,X}}$, the correlation between $X_{j}$ and the response/recording indicator $R_{j}$; (2) a data quantity measure, $\sqrt{(N-n)/n}$, where $N$ is the population size; and (3) a problem difficulty measure, $\sigma_{X}$, the standard deviation of $X$. This decomposition provides multiple insights: (I) Probabilistic sampling ensures high data quality by controlling $\rho_{{R,X}}$ at the level of $N^{-1/2}$; (II) When we lose this control, the impact of $N$ is no longer canceled by $\rho_{{R,X}}$, leading to a Law of Large Populations (LLP), that is, our estimation error, relative to the benchmarking rate $1/\sqrt{n}$, increases with $\sqrt{N}$; and (III) the “bigness” of such Big Data (for population inferences) should be measured by the relative size $f=n/N$, not the absolute size $n$; (IV) When combining data sources for population inferences, those relatively tiny but higher quality ones should be given far more weights than suggested by their sizes. Estimates obtained from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) of the 2016 US presidential election suggest a $\rho_{{R,X}}\approx-0.005$ for self-reporting to vote for Donald Trump. Because of LLP, this seemingly minuscule data defect correlation implies that the simple sample proportion of the self-reported voting preference for Trump from $1\%$ of the US eligible voters, that is, $n\approx2\mbox{,}300\mbox{,}000$, has the same mean squared error as the corresponding sample proportion from a genuine simple random sample of size $n\approx400$, a $99.98\%$ reduction of sample size (and hence our confidence). The CCES data demonstrate LLP vividly: on average, the larger the state’s voter populations, the further away the actual Trump vote shares from the usual $95\%$ confidence intervals based on the sample proportions. This should remind us that, without taking data quality into account, population inferences with Big Data are subject to a Big Data Paradox: the more the data, the surer we fool ourselves.
projecteuclid.org
April 28, 2025 at 8:07 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
🚨new Indie SAGE report on childhood diseases!

🧵Vaccines have been so successful that once common diseases are now so rare that even many doctors might never see a case.

In this report we describe 12 diseases, their consequences & impact of vaccines 1/15

independentsage.org/report/preve...
March 26, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
After a soft launch in the last couple of weeks, #wmatrix version 7 is now completely freely available worldwide for academic users plus UK government and NHS email addresses. This is the largest revision of the software since it was created 25 years ago: ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/
Wmatrix corpus analysis and comparison tool
ucrel.lancs.ac.uk
March 25, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Post-pandemic, a new type of vaccine scepticism has emerged online, underscoring the need for public health messaging to address confusion around what vaccines do – finds research co-authored by @zsofiademjen.bsky.social with Lancaster University.
bit.ly/41Kg8dX
Better public health communication needed to address post-pandemic vaccine scepticism | IOE - Faculty of Education and Society
Post-pandemic, a new type of vaccine scepticism has emerged online that claims certain vaccines are not “real vaccines” – finds research co-authored by Dr Zsófia Demjén with Lancaster University.
bit.ly
March 24, 2025 at 1:04 PM
The IOE has also put together a short piece featuring our latest Questioning Vaccination Discourse paper:
www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/202...
Better public health communication needed to address post-pandemic vaccine scepticism | IOE - Faculty of Education and Society
Post-pandemic, a new type of vaccine scepticism has emerged online that claims certain vaccines are not “real vaccines” – finds research co-authored by Dr Zsófia Demjén with Lancaster University.
www.ucl.ac.uk
March 21, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
I have written a piece for @theconversationuk.bsky.social about our study on a new form of vaccine scepticism: people questioning the status of some vaccines as vaccines, starting during the pandemic
theconversation.com/its-not-a-va... @lancslinguistics.bsky.social @corpussocialsci.bsky.social
‘It’s not a vaccine, it’s a shot’: uncovering a new trend in vaccine scepticism
The COVID pandemic triggered a new kind of vaccine scepticism shared by people who normally take up vaccines – here’s why that’s a problem.
theconversation.com
March 20, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Pre-orders are crucial not just for writers but independent book shops, too. And in the post-twitter world people aren’t hearing as much about forthcoming books.

So, a reminder: pre-order when you can, from independent bookshops, and have a nosey around bsky for your old bookish friends.
Time for a bit of reality - a thread.

Sales in the shop are doing well, but we're reliant on sales on the website to help pay the bills.

The website is reliant on social media, particularly twitter.

Since September, we've seen a big decline in people seeing our tweets.
March 3, 2025 at 9:18 AM
And here is the link to this one: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can't quite believe I forgot! Definitely lost the posting habit over the last year or so...
February 24, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Another 'Questioning Vaccination Discourses' paper is out!

"‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: A new type of vaccine-specific scepticism on Twitter/X during the COVID-19 pandemic" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

By @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social et al
February 24, 2025 at 10:43 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Funded PhD opportunity at Lancaster:

'The sharing of personal lived experience by peer support workers working in mental health services in NHS, social care and third sector organisations.'

Open to applicants with a background in Linguistics as well as Psychology
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
The sharing of personal lived experience by peer support workers working in mental health services in NHS, social care and third sector organisations. at Lancaster University on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - The sharing of personal lived experience by peer support workers working in mental health services in NHS, social care and third sector organisations. at Lancaster University, listed on ...
www.findaphd.com
February 18, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
It seems like as good a day as any to repost links to the five metaphor-based animations we created - based on this paper journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... - about the importance of #vaccines. @sflusberg.bsky.social

First one: A castle metaphor for how vaccines work
youtu.be/DOD854panQg?...
How do vaccines work? A castle metaphor
YouTube video by Science Animated
youtu.be
February 19, 2025 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by Dr Zsófia Demjén
Looking forward to welcoming both in person and online attendees to Lancaster for our 2025 health and science communication workshop series this March! We've got great speakers and fascinating topics lined up...

For more information and to register, see: baalhealthsci.wordpress.com/2025/02/04/2...
February 13, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Some very cool #healthcomm work from colleagues @ioe.bsky.social
"We are all musical." #IOEPodcast

We hear from Evangelos Himonides on the power of music and how it intersects with technology, health and wellbeing. He tells us about his work with Shout at Cancer, which uses music to help those recovering after a laryngectomy.

Listen: pod.fo/e/2aaa88
February 11, 2025 at 12:37 PM
I suppose one way to start here is to share a new publication. Here it goes:

'‘I am still unsure’ - Spontaneous expressions of vaccine indecision on Mumsnet'

with @vaclavbrezina.bsky.social @elenasemino.bsky.social @williamdance.bsky.social @drclaireh.bsky.social et al.
#healthcomm #vaccinations
February 11, 2025 at 10:15 AM