Prospective PhD students, 2023

I'm open to advising new PhD students this year interested in the intersection of NLP and cultural analytics/computational social science. For a sense of my group's current research directions, have a look at our recent publications -- much of it is focused on designing new algorithmic measuring devices for aspects of culture, along with questions of sociolinguistic variation, and this will continue in the future.

The research in my group is interdisciplinary by nature, drawing on natural language processing, computer vision and theoretical traditions in sociolinguistics, literary theory, and film. My primary communities are ACL and the subset of the digital humanities focused on cultural analytics (epitomized by JCA), and we often publish our work at conferences and journals associated with those communities (ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, etc.). A typical incoming student working with me often comes into our program as a competent programmer (with experience on the command line and strategies for debugging), and is deeply read in the disciplinary tradition they'd like to contribute to (e.g., Foucault, Labov). This often involves students with some training in computer science, but not necessarily with a degree in it -- I welcome students who were trained outside of that discipline (my own background is a BA is Classics and MA in Linguistics before I started my own PhD) so long as you have experience doing empirical things. And while this is the profile for a typical student, it is not definitional -- the research values I cultivate are originality and creativity, which can be realized in many forms.

Note that the School of Information admits students holistically in deliberation by the entire faculty (not by direct admit by any individual professor). I am able to co-advise students in EECS as well if you identify a primary advisor there; however, I primarily advise students in the School of Information.