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. Iām 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)