Research Areas

Linguistics

My linguistics training had a very strong historical component, with a focus on Slavic and wider Indo-European. I like experimental and computational approaches and get bored quickly when doing interpretative, close-reading work (which is my limit: I look up to traditional philologists).

The main areas I work on are:

My doctoral project looked (quantitatively, through treebank data) into the competition between finite and non-finite temporal subordinates in Early Slavic, and their position within the typology of when-clauses in 1400+ languages of the world.

Computational Humanities

It’s hard to set Computational Humanities apart from my main areas of research, and that’s often true for computational humanists at large: one tends to approach CH to answer questions in their research areas, and then may find themselves wondering about CH tools and techniques as such. The following are some of the areas I have worked in:

Some of my recent contributions include:

Open Scholarship in the Humanities

I am a Fellow at RROx, the Oxford ‘branch’ of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN). I was previously also Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD).

I’m interested in the specific challenges faced by the Humanities in making research reproducible (also: I get a bit angry when I am not given the steps followed by another researcher to get to an interpretation or a result).

Some of my contributions to the discussion:

Selected past contributions in collaborative projects

Living with Machines (The Alan Turing Institute)

Between January 2022 and July 2023 I was Research Associate in the Living with Machines (LwM) project at The Alan Turing Institute. The overarching goal of LwM was to investigate the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution. My job consisted in analyzing a very large amount of (very noisy) historical British newspaper data computationally, with a focus on looking into how language use changed throughout the 19th century as an effect of the socio-political changes following the Industrial Revolution. See here for an example of results from my research.

Also, check out below two episodes of a docuseries on Living with Machines, where my colleages and I talk about collaboration in large interdisciplinary projects in the Humanities and the Language of Mechanization subprojects in which I was involved.

On collaboration:

On the Language of Mechanization:

Depictions of Post-COVID-19 Futures in Russian International Media: Multimodal Viewpoint Analysis (IMCC, University of Oxford)

Starting from mid-2020, I was first Research Assistant , then collaborated with the International Multimodal Communication Centre (IMCC) based within the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) at the University of Oxford. I carried out annotation and correlation analyses of speech-gesture co-occurrences in Russian and American media, largely within the project Depictions of Post-COVID-19 Futures in Russian International Media: Multimodal Viewpoint Analysis .

ReadOxford (University of Oxford, Deptartment of Expiremental Psychology)

In 2020 I spent two months as a Research Assistant at the ReadOxford research group, based at the Department of Experimental Psychology of the University of Oxford. The aim of the group is to answer different questions related to child literacy development. I mainly dealt with data processing, developing R scripts to make corpus data reproducible and analysable for morphological complexity and lexical variation. My major contribution has been scripting an R code to automatically calculate the Average Reduced Frequency (ARF) of combined lemmata/parts of speech in the Oxford Children Corpus and Childes treebank.

Enhancing catalogue metadata of Slavonic early-printed Cyrillic books (British Library)

In 2015, I spent two months as a trainee Assistant Curator-Cataloguer for the Slavonic Collections at The British Library . During that time, I enhanced the online catalogue of all Slavonic early-printed Cyrillic books held at the British Library (and fuelled my interest for all-things data and pre-modern Slavic). Check out two posts I wrote for the British Library’s European Studies Blog:

Zoom in on some of my projects

Parallel Bibles
Temporal subordination in 1400+ languages of the world
Machines in the media
Semantic change in the era of mechanization
OldSlavNet
A scalable dependency parser for pre-modern Slavic
Ancient Greek graph-based syntactic embeddings
Syntactic word representations for Ancient Greek