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This paper demonstrates the use of mixed methods discovery techniques to explore public perceptions of community safety and risk, using computational techniques that combine and integrate layers of information to reveal connections between community and place. Perceived vulnerability to crime is conceptualised using an etic/emic framework. The etic "outsider" viewpoint imposes its categorisation of vulnerability not only on areas ("crime hot spots" or "deprived neighbourhoods") but also on socially constructed groupings of individuals (the "sick" or the "poor") based on particular qualities considered relevant by the analyst. The range of qualities is often both narrow and shallow. The alternative, emic, "insider" perspective explores vulnerability based on the meanings held by the individuals informed by their lived experience. Using recorded crime data and Census-derived area classifications, we categorise an area in Southern England from an etic viewpoint. Mobile interviews with local residents and police community support officers and researcher-led environmental audits provide qualitative emic data. GIS software provides spatial context to analytically link both quantitative and qualitative data. We demonstrate how this approach reveals hidden sources of community resilience and produces findings that explicate low level social disorder and vandalism as turns in a "dialogue" of resistance against urbanisation and property development.

This article reports fieldwork with an Access Grid Node ('AGN') device, analogous to video teleconferencing but based on grid computational technology. The device enables research respondents to be interviewed at remote sites, with potential savings in travelling to conduct fieldwork. Practical, methodological and analytic aspects of the experimental fieldwork are reported. Findings include some distinctive features of AGN interviews relative to co-present interviews; overall, there were some benefits and some disadvantages to communication. The article concludes that this new research interview mode shows potential, particularly once the difficulties associated with a new research technology are resolved.

In this paper the concept of 'signal crimes' is proposed to capture the social semiotic processes by which particular types of criminal and disorderly conduct have a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime. Drawing upon the wider social scientific literature on risk perception, a sense of how and why different crime types might be possessed of different signal values is provided and some of the implications for current police practice outlined.

In this article, I examine the possibility of using TURING's concept of "imitation games" to analyze political discourse. This poses the theoretical question of identity matching. It also poses a methodological question: Is it possible to distinguish, using only internal criteria, the political discourse of political actors that belong to two distinct categories? The effort to answer these theoretical and methodological questions highlights important common motives in quantitative and qualitative research.