About Me
I am a Ph.D. linguistics student at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in writing systems and computational linguistics. My research focuses on how writing encodes language and how we can formally distinguish language from noise.
This website showcases my academic work, projects, and research assistance services.
Research Assistance Services
I provide technical support for research projects, including:
- Data Scraping: Collecting structured and unstructured data from digital sources.
- Data Analysis: Processing, modeling, and statistical analysis in Python or R.
- Data Visualization: Clear, publication-ready charts and figures.
I offer a free consultation. See my Services page for details.
Research Interests
My research asks how writing systems encode linguistic information. I take a computational approach that draws on information theory, computational linguistics, and historical linguistics, building on work such as (Coulmas, 1989, 2003) and (Sproat, 2000).
I treat writing as a proper object of linguistic investigation, not merely a secondary representation of speech. I study which formal, quantifiable properties distinguish linguistic signal from stochastic noise that can appear linguistic. This includes modeling sub-word regularities and cross-linguistic constraints, and using information-theoretic measures to assess structure, efficiency, and redundancy in writing systems (including script directionality). This also requires engaging with competing accounts of what counts as “language,” and with theories that separate possible human languages from impossible ones.
At its core, my work asks what language is, using writing systems as a testbed for methods that distinguish language from non-language.
Education
- M.A. Linguistic Theory & Typology, University of Kentucky (2024)
- B.A. Philosophy, Western Kentucky University (2018)
Selected Presentations
| Year | Title | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Predicting the Direction of Writing Using Character Gram Sequences | 16th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society (ILLS16) |
| 2024 | Data Degradation in the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States | American Dialect Society |
| 2023 | Investigating the Etymology of ‘Bogle’ - A Dialectological Approach | American Dialect Society |
| 2023 | Deciphering Historical Texts Using Word Embeddings | Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference |
| 2022 | Logography? More like NOgography: Reconsidering Writing System Typologies | Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference |
Affiliations
Linguistic Atlas Project
University of Kentucky
A comprehensive study documenting linguistic variation in American English dialects since 1929. The project includes digitization of over 90 years of linguistic data to make it accessible for modern research. Learn More
DECRYPT Project
Stockholm University
An interdisciplinary initiative focused on decrypting historical manuscripts. Combining computational linguistics, cryptology, and philology, the project develops tools for analyzing and making historical ciphers accessible. Learn More
