Team

Maciej Eder works as Visiting Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Tartu, and Professor in Linguistics at the Institute of Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences). Currently, he is also the Chair of the Committee of Linguistics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the principal investigator of the project Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure, co-founder of the Computational Stylistics Group, and the main developer of the R package ‘Stylo’ for performing stylometric analyses. While Maciej’s background is Early Modern literature, specifically the 17th-century Polish and Latin prose, his career path was shaped by a few unexpected twists, including a position of a lexicographer (working on the 15th-century Polish), and then a researcher in quantitative linguistics (exploring language change). Currently, Maciej’s main research area lays somewhere between literary studies and linguistics, and revolves around computer-assisted text analysis and quantitative approaches to style variation. These include measuring style using statistical methods, authorship attribution based on quantitative measures, as well as ‘distant reading’ methods to analyze dozens (or hundreds) of literary works at a time.

Joshua Wilbur works as Lecturer is Digital Linguistics. After completing his MA in General Linguistics from the University of Leipzig, he started a PhD project aimed at documenting and describing Pite Saami, a critically endangered Uralic language spoken in northern Scandinavia. The resulting documentaiton corpus was the basis for his PhD in General Linguistics from Kiel University and for A Grammar of Pite Saami, a fully open-access monograph. In the context of a postdoc project at the University of Freiburg, he began working with the Giellatekno Research group for Saami Language Technology to implement an NLP infrastructure for Pite Saami, including automatically annotating his spoken-language documentation corpus. He also published a (paper) dictionary of Pite Saami and continues to develop and maintain an online digital lexical resource for Pite Saami. He moved to Tartu in 2019 and worked as Visiting Lecturer in Digital Humanities for 3.5 years, before he finally stopped “visiting” and settled down in Tartu in his current position as Lecturer in Digital Linguistics. Joshua is the National Coordinator for CLARIN ERIC in Estonia and is the Chair of the Pite Saami Standardization Committee.