About me

I am currently available for freelance work and collaborations. If you’re interested, please get in touch.

I am a scientific programmer and full-stack web developer working with linguistic data and low-resource languages. My weapon of choice for 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 built comparative databases, morphological parsers, transliteration systems, and tools for “lifting” legacy data.

I am a tinkerer and enjoy picking the right tool for each job. While I am most comfortable with Django (backend) and Bootstrap (frontend), I adapt to project needs. 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.

I have a background in descriptive and historical linguistics, with specialization in Cariban languages, though 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.