Category: Blog Posts 2026

25 May 202625 May 2026

Chasing the Hansard “Spirit”: My Glasgow Secondment Story

Beaming with excitement: The secondment started with a campus tour, led by Michael Pidd, the Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (University of Sheffield)

One of the greatest perks of being an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) within CASCADE is the uniquely designed secondments at renowned institutions. For my PhD project, The ‘Spirit’ in the Chamber: Capturing Zeitgeist in UK parliamentary debates, I had an invaluable opportunity to engage in an intensive 11-week secondment at the University of Glasgow from 30 October 2025, together with my fellow Sheffield ESR, Maria. I enthusiastically dived deep into the quirky yet fascinating history of parliamentary reporting, stories of data mining throughout the years, and hopeful prospects of yet another captivating research story of the UK parliamentary discourse.

31 March 202631 March 2026

Major Developments in Morocco – An ESR tale from EACL by Bách Phan-Tất

Main conference room at EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco

Travelling to the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) in Rabat, Morocco was one of the highlights of my PhD so far. It was my very first paper presentation at my very first big conference, so naturally I arrived with equal amounts of excitement, nerves, and the vague feeling that I should try very hard not to look too obviously starstruck.

24 February 202624 February 2026

Learning the Ropes in Leuven – ESR Maria Flores Alejo reflects on the first CASCADE convention.

On the 28th and 29th of January the CASCADE Network came together once again for what would be our 4th official reunion and first convention, this time the venue was the charming town of Leuven, Belgium. Unfortunately, since we arrived the evening before the start of the convention after a full day of travel from Sheffield, our wanderlust would have to wait.

One and a half years in, the network seems to have developed a tacit routine during these meet-ups with some of us choosing to use breakfast time to socialize and talk about the upcoming activities while others prefer to catch-up on sleep. However, this time, the interactions had an underlying nervousness as ESRs prepared to present their research projects to both peers and supervisors.