Lorcan McLaren
PhD Researcher
University College Dublin

I am a PhD researcher and Iseult Honohan scholar in computational social science at University College Dublin. Based in the Connected_Politics Lab under the supervision of James P. Cross, I also serve as a Climate Fellow at the UCD Earth Institute. My research employs text-as-data approaches to examine political communication, with a particular focus on the climate crisis.

Prior to my doctoral studies, I completed a BA in Computer Science, Linguistics and French at Trinity College Dublin and an MSc in Politics and Data Science at University College Dublin, complemented by two years of industry experience as a data analyst.

Research

Working Papers

Publications

A heuristic method for automatic gaze detection in constrained multi-modal dialogue corpora
with Maria Koutsombogera and Carl Vogel.
Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom), 2020.

Gaze, dominance and dialogue role in the MULTISIMO corpus
with Maria Koutsombogera and Carl Vogel.
Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom), 2020.

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Projects

Text Annotation Tooling
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Teaching

Module Instructuctor

  • AI and Large Language Models, Postgraduate (Spring 2025)

Teaching Assistant

  • Introduction to EU Politics, Undergraduate (Autumn 2023, 2024)
  • Research Methods in Political Science, Undergraduate (Spring 2024)

Contact

For inquiries, collaboration opportunities, or to discuss my work, feel free to reach out via email.