Most of my work here involves modeling change in language. I'm particularly interested in changes in sounds, especially vowels in New Zealand English. I also work with text, with a more digital humanities approach. In this area, I'm particularly keen on exploring the new affordances of large digitised newspaper archives for intellectual history and especially for the history of philosophy.
Here's some methods I use and am happy to talk about with people (both to learn more and to convey what I've picked up):
- GAMMs via the
mgcv
package in R. - Dimension reductions methods for exploring linguistic covariation, incl. PCA, MFA, MCA, etc.
- LDA topic modelling with
gensim
in Python. - Question answering models.
For more information, see my personal website: https://joshua.wilsonblack.nz.