About me

I have a background in descriptive and historical linguistics, but have developed a heavy computational bend. Despite having somewhat specialized on Cariban languages, I am fundamentally interested in all human languages and their structural aspects, from phonetic details to diachronic morphosyntax. I mostly work with “low-resource” languages, for which no large amounts of data or trained models are available. In my post-doc project I focused on creating a framework for writing digital grammars.

Most of the work I do can be given the label of scientific programming; my weapon of choice for linguistic data wrangling is python, often using pandas. I am well-versed in the CLDF/CLLD framework (see my components for typical descriptive data), and have experience with TEI. I have also built comparative databases, morphological parsers, transliteration systems, and tools for “lifting” legacy data.

I also have experience as a full-stack web developer, mostly using Django and Bootstrap. Currently I am creating the next version of the TITUS database. A particular interest of mine are maps; two examples of my work are the interactive map of German-speaking Switzerland in the Swiss German Dialect Corpus, and a python library for projecting family trees onto maps.

If you’re interested in collaboration, please get in touch.