#text analytics

I’ve gone from zero interviews with librarians to two in two months! I’m so excited to interview Heather Froehlich this month for two reasons. The first is that it’s a neat comparison with Shanna’s story last month of the different ways linguistics can take you into a library career. The second is that Heather is one of the lovely assortment of linguists on Twitter (@heatherfro). You may also recognise some of the names in Heather’s interview - she helped me get in touch with a number of people who have appeared in the Linguistics Jobs series! Also, I’m thinking of getting “Humanities behemoth" printed on my next set of business cards.

What did you study at university?

I was a bit of a Humanities behemoth: I have a double major in English and Linguistics and picked up a minor in Women’s Studies from the University of New Hampshire, which as my friends Allie, Braden and Caneel have all talked about, really stressed the study of the structure of language rather than its function.

Unlike Allie, Braden and Caneel, I spent my third year at university translating Old English into Modern English and was mostly terrible at it, but I found the overlap between the relationship between literature and linguistics and the history of English as a language to be totally fascinating. I was always interested in Early Modern English because it feels like a middle point in the history of the English language: we have Old English on one end and contemporary English on the other, and there is an enormous of political and social upheaval in the period too. I became very interested in ways English – and the language used to describe marginalized people -  has changed over time.

In 2010 I moved to Scotland to do a research masters in literary linguistics working on gender-specific possession in Shakespeare’s plays using corpus methods, which then became a PhD expanding on the language of social identity in Early Modern dramatic writing using corpus stylistic methods. I guess I continue to be a humanities behemoth, only now I’ve added elements of information science and computer science to the mix too.

What is your job?

My full title is “Digital Scholarship Fellow in Quantitative Text Analysis” and I’m an Assistant Librarian at Penn State University. I’m a corpus linguist and I support other people wanting to do quantitative work with text across the humanities at Penn State. 

Despite my long title, my job is pretty simple: I count words in lots of texts using computers and teach other people in the Liberal Arts and associated disciplines how to do this. My job is pretty new (both in its existence at PSU and for me, as I started in May 2017). At the moment, I do a lot of talking about what I do and how I can help different departments - this presently includes giving talks, giving overviews of ways I use corpus methods in my research, and sort of generally talking up my work and my areas of expertise. I also have a lot of scope to do my own research and support on other people’s projects. Every day is a little different but it’s always fun. I get to hear a lot about a lot of other people’s interests and think about how my knowledge can help them.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

My research is about Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ usage of the language of social identity, I have taught several classes on topics like Shakespeare and language, and I am now teaching people how to use corpus methods to support their specific research interests. So, I use my linguistics degree every day in my day-to-day work, and it informs pretty much every aspect of my professional life.

But it’s important to stress I wasn’t formally trained, really. I was kind of given a computer and told to figure it out, but I think that also really helped me understand why digital methods mattered to me. I didn’t care that Mary has eight watermelons and Jane has 17 oranges and why do these people have so much fruit? But I did care why Macbeth uses ‘she’ much less than other Shakespearean plays.

I also started doing this kind of work in 2009-2010, just before the term ‘Digital Humanities’ hit the mainstream academic world, which was both convenient and slightly confusing. In a lot of ways, I was extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but I also really benefitted from having a strong background the humanities and having to figure out the computer stuff as I went.

Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I’m beyond grateful I was encouraged to experiment with different classes and disciplines as a built-in feature of my undergraduate degree. I’ve come to realize this is hugely unique to the American education system: I wouldn’t have taken a linguistics class if it hadn’t fulfilled a general education requirement in my freshman year. I certainly didn’t expect it to change my life. So I would encourage every student to try to take coursework that interests them outside their discipline (especially in an educational system which has very set coursework). Even if you don’t end up taking it for credit, just sit in and listen: you are letting yourself experience a new perspective, which is important.

Any other thoughts or comments?

I’ve never felt like linguistics is a siloed discipline unto itself, as it has implications for all sorts of people, whereas my other disciplinary homes can be a bit more specific about what matters to them and why. More importantly, the Linguistics Jobs interview series has clearly highlighted my suspicions that you learn a lot of different skills in syntax, phonology and sociolinguistics classes. This is a great thing - you walk out with a lot of confidence in learning new methods and approaches quickly! Use it to your absolute advantage on the job market.

Previously:

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Interview with a User Experience (UX) Researcher

Interview with a Study Abroad Facilitator

Interview with The Career Linguist

Interview with a local radio Digital Managing Editor

Interview with a freelance translator and editor

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