Research
Below is information about some of the projects that I have worked on.
Project title: Transnational networks among European missionaries in colonial Australia: building a digital repository of epistolary correspondence
Funder: University of Western Australia Research Collaboration Award
Date: January - December 2018
My role: Co-investigator
This project was led by Professor John Kinder at the University of Western Australia, Perth. The aims were to digitise and annotate historical missionary letters located in archives around Australia and to then analyse those letters (using computational methods) for: (1) the experiential dimension of missionaries, singly and as members of networks, and (2) the emotional dimension of the relationships, especially friendships, that were maintained by the correspondence.
Project Title: Evaluating Cyber Security Evidence for Policy Advice
Funder: EPSRC
Date: March 2017 - March 2019
My Role: Research Assistant
Website: www.ecsepa.coventry.ac.uk
This project, led by Madeline Carr (UCL) and Siraj Shaikh (Coventry University), examined the ways in which cyber evidence is interpreted, evaluated and assessed by policy makers. The key aims of the project were to: 1) evaluate what exactly constitutes the evidence presented to and accessed by policy advisors, how they privilege and order that evidence and what the quality of that evidence is; 2) identify the particular challenges of decision making in this context and evaluate how effectively policy makers make use of evidence for giving advice, and 3) develop a framework to assess the effectiveness of evidence-based cyber security policy making that can be used to make recommendations for improvement and that can be re-applied to other cohorts. My role on this project was to use corpus and computational methods of analysis to explore the language of different types of cyber evidence.
Project title: Digitising Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections
Funder: AHRC Research Networking Grant
Date: April 2013 - June 2014
My role: Co-Investigator
Website: www.lettersofmigration.blogspot.com
The purpose of this research network was to discuss some of the challenges surrounding the digitisation of historical migrant letter collections and to look at ways of capturing and representing information about letters (the participants involved and their locations, for instance) using TEI markup. Our key aims were to 1) improve interconnectivity between existing digital collections of migrant correspondence, 2) provide a forum to address the complex issues surrounding the accessibility, intellectual property rights and privacy of all those contributing to the creation of digital correspondence collections, 3) encourage and investigate new ways of organizing, interpreting, and using the various types of information embedded within digitised migrant correspondence, 4) improve access to digital resources of interest to academics, the general public, and a broad range of cultural and creative industries and 5) promote international collaboration.
Project title: New Connections: The BT e-Archive Project
Funder: JISC: Strand B of the JISC eContent Capital Programme
Date: December 2011 - July 2013
My role: Co-lead for the research team working on correspondence
Website: http://www.digitalarchives.bt.com/web/arena/research/hilary-emma
This project was a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage and The National Archive. The key aims of the project were to catalogue, digitise and develop a searchable online archive of almost half a million photographs, images, documents and correspondence assembled by BT over 165 years. As part of this project a research team was set-up to work specifically with the letter component of the archive. This involved digitising and marking-up 500 letters which could then be searched in various ways, allowing users to carry out diachronic studies of business correspondence, examining how the language and the genre evolves over a 100 year period.
Project title: Increasing interoperability between corpus tools
Funder: JISC: Strand D
Date: February - July 2012
My role: Project Manager
The aim of this project was to introduce corpus linguistics methods to research communities who are engaged in the study of language from different perspectives, and who have previously drawn on only a limited range of corpus software, or none at all. It explored ways of linking different corpus query tools so that users can investigate aspects of the same data in a variety of ways. The number of tools that can interlink depends on software configurations and the willingness of other software developers to incorporate interoperability features. For this project, we offered a prototype tool to link the WordTree, Intellitext, CQPweb and Wmatrix (four core tools developed at Coventry University, the University of Leeds and Lancaster University).
Project title: Adaptable and learnable user interfaces for research tools: The Word Tree Corpus Interface
Funder: JISC: Strand C
Date: May - December 2011
My role: Project Manager
The aim of this project was to develop a multi-dimensional Word Tree interface which would allow users to search and browse within documents and across a corpus, and access instant visual representation of the language patterns surrounding any given word or phrase. The goal was to increase access and usage of corpus resources, both by corpus linguists and by language teachers and learners.