About me

I am a researcher working at the intersection of sociophonetics, language ideologies and voice-based AI technologies. With a background in theoretical linguistics and sociophonetics, I am interested in language modelling and scale-making practices,  their embodied enactments, entanglement in network cultures and specific rearrangements of materials. I study both how sensorimotor capacities are entangled in bodily experiences and how they are embedded in their sociocultural and technological contexts.

In my work with situated audio and audiovisual recordings, I study how humans use voice in relation to the use of objects, technologies, acoustic features of the environment and dynamics of sociocultural space. I also consider how voice AI technologies are transforming human sociolinguistic capabilities of action. I’m interested in how vocal forms are mediated through language ideologies: how they are heard, evaluated and responded to in ways that mirror and challenge wider power dynamics and politics of inclusion and exclusion. Currently, I focus on the ways in which human language data is interpreted by machines: how AI systems trained on human speech make sense of linguistic difference, who is heard, misheard or erased.

Areas of expertise

sociophonetics language ideologies transcription, linguistic annotation & coding

automatic speech recognition voice AI AI ethics

audiovisual methodologies non-standardised speech distributed agency multimodal analysis

My research practice is supported by interdisciplinary training spanning across linguistic, computational and creative approaches:

Linguistic theory:

LSA Summer Linguistic Institute, University of California at Berkeley, USA (2009)

Computational and Statistical Tools:

Praat for phonetic analysis

Elan and NVivo for linguistic annotation and coding, conversation and discourse analysis

Python for natural language processing

R for statistical analysis

Antconc for corpus analysis of textual data

Multimodal Analysis and Storytelling:

Film training at Birkbeck and Open City Doc School, UCL e.g.: Documentary Storytelling, Visual Anthropology and the City, Filmmaking as a research technique, etc. (2018)

Film editing (DaVinci Resolve, iMovie)