On 5 July 2012, Dr Alison Sealey, senior lecturer for the Department of English, gave a presentation at the Mass Observation Anniversaries Conference on research she is doing into how animals are represented in different kinds of discourse. 

She and Professor Nickie Charles, a sociologist at the University of Warwick, presented What they say and how they say it, in which they contrasted their respective analyses of the 'Animals and Humans' directive to which Mass Observation panellists were invited to respond in 2009. Alison demonstrated how corpus linguistics can contribute a particular perspective to the analysis of this kind of written data.