Staff profile

Shauna Concannon is an assistant professor in Computer Science (Digital Humanities) at Durham University, with research interests in computational linguistics, social interaction and human-computer interactionShauna’s work focuses on socio-technical understandings and ethical implications of technologies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, their work explores how information is communicated and how knowledge is linguistically encoded in an increasingly technologically-mediated society. 

Much of their work focuses on natural language processing applications such as text classification and dialogue systems. This encompasses studies of how information and opinion are shared and negotiated online, through to studies of how humans interact with AI systems. A current area of interest is the linguistic expression of harmful bias and prejudice in textual datasets, and what this means for developing equitable and socially just processes and systems.

Shauna started her academic life in the humanities, completing a masters in modernist literature at the University of Oxford before completing a PhD on deliberation in computer-mediated dialogue in the Computational Linguistics Lab, Queen Mary University of London. More recently, they completed postdoctoral research at the Universities of Cambridge, York and Newcastle, working on inequities and bias in language-based AI systems, intersectional approaches to data science and interactive video for human-data engagement.

• Online deliberation and argumentation
• Computational social science
• Digital Humanities
• Natural Language Processing
• Societal and ethical impacts of emerging technologies
• Generative AI
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Disagreement and conflict
• Feminist approaches to data science
• Empathy and emotion
• Pragmatics
• Semantics
• Sociolinguistics
• Online harms
• Disinformation / misinformation
• Participatory and human centred approaches
• Dialogue

Conference Paper

• Dow, Andy, Montague, Kyle, Concannon, Shauna & Vines, John (2022), Scaffolding Young People's Participation in Public Service Evaluation through Designing a Digital Feedback Process, Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 319.
• Ursu, Marian, Smith, Davy, Hook, Jonathan, Concannon, Shauna & Gray, John (2020), Authoring Interactive Fictional Stories in Object-Based Media (OBM), ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences. 127.
• Concannon, Shauna, Rajan, Natasha, Shah, Parthiv, Smith, Davy, Ursu, Marian & Hook, Jonathan (2020), Brooke Leave Home: Designing a Personalized Film to Support Public Engagement with Open Data, Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1.
• Concannon, Shauna Julia, Balaam, Madeline, Simpson, Emma & Comber, Rob (2018), Applying Computational Analysis to Textual Data from the Wild, Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1.
• Concannon, Shauna, Purver, Matthew & Healey, Patrick (2017), Opening Up and Closing Down Discussion: Experimenting with Epistemic Status in Conversation, 39th annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017). London.
• Concannon, Shauna Healey, Patrick & Purver, Matthew (2016), How Natural is Argument in Natural dialogue?, In The 16th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument, at IJCAI. New York.
• Myketiak, Chrystie, Concannon, Shauna & Curzon, Paul (2015), New/s Design: Informing Future Design Processes by Understanding Media Reporting of Medical Errors with Medical Devices [invited paper], Proceedings of the 5th EAI International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare - 'Transforming healthcare through innovations in mobile and wireless technologies'.
• Concannon, Shauna, Healey, Patrick & Purver, Matthew (2015), Shifting Opinions: Experiments on Agreement and Disagreement in Dialogue, SemDial 2015 (goDIAL). Gothenburg, Sweden.
• Concannon, Shauna, Purver, Matthew & Healey, Pat (2015), Taking a Stance: a Corpus Study of Reported Speech, SemDial 2015 (goDIAL). Gothenburg, Sweden.
• Concannon, Shauna & Purver, Matthew (2014), Inferring Cultural Preference of Arts Audiences Through Twitter Data, Digital Intelligence. Nantes.

Journal Article

• Chubb, Jennifer, Missaoui, Sondess, Concannon, Shauna, Maloney, Liam & Walker, James Alfred (2022). Interactive storytelling for children: A case-study of design and development considerations for ethical conversational AI. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 32: 100403.
• Baker, Hannah Concannon, Shauna Meller, Matthias Cohen, Katie Millington, Alice Ward, Sam & So, Emily (2022). COVID-19 and Science Advice on the ‘Grand Stage’ The Metadata and Linguistic Choices in a Scientific Advisory Groups’ Meeting Minutes. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
• Baker, Hannah, Concannon, Shauna & So, Emily (2022). Information sharing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study about face masks. PLOS ONE 17(5): e0268043.
• Tomalin, Marcus, Byrne, Bill, Concannon, Shauna, Saunders, Danielle & Ullmann, Stefanie (2021). The practical ethics of bias reduction in machine translation: why domain adaptation is better than data debiasing. Ethics and Information Technology 23(3): 419.
• Myketiak, Chrystie, Concannon, Shauna & Curzon, Paul (2017). Narrative perspective, person references, and evidentiality in clinical incident reports. Journal of Pragmatics 117: 139.