Director

Andrew Piper is director of .txtLAB, and is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He likes fan fiction, Netflix and the eighteenth century. His motto is, “We can test that!”

 

 

 

 

Research Assistants

 

Sunyam Bagga is a second-year Master’s student in Computer Science at McGill. In .txtLAB, he has been working on the Visibility of Knowledge project since October. His research interests involve applying machine learning and natural language processing techniques to study culture, and predict large-scale human behaviour. When he is not doing his research, he is busy playing tennis and poker (which is not gambling!).

 

 

 

 

Emilienne Greenfield is a PhD student at McGill in the Department of History and Classical Studies, working on 16th and 17th century gardening practices in Europe and New France. She is passionate about all things plants, love learning languages, and transcribing old manuscripts. As part of the lab, Emilienne is currently working as a research assistant for the Visibility of Knowledge project.

 

 

 

Fatoumata (Fatim) Diallo is completing her BA in East Asia Studies with a minor in Political Science at McGill University. As a recent addition to txtLab, Fatim has been assisting with research which attempts to understand the reverberations of prestige in academia. Throughout her studies she has been interested in exploring the relationships between fan cultures, new media and democracy–especially in East Asia.

 

 

 

 

Eve Kraicer is a recent graduate from McGill University with a BA in Cultural Studies. She is currently the Senior RA at .txtLAB. Eve’s research mainly focuses on applying intersectional feminist theory to computational and statistical analyses of texts. She is the resident txtLAB coffee snob and can also solve a Rubik’s cube really, really slowly.

 

 

 

 

James Manalad is a 3rd year student doing a joint major in Physics and Computer Science. He is responsible for cleaning heaps and piles of text collections, and uploading them to the txtLAB database. He also provides some support to the Journal of Cultural Analytics and tender loving care for the computers in txtLAB.

 

 

 

 

 

Anne Meisner (“Anne” pronounced like “on a boat”) is a fourth year Computer Science and Linguistics double major with an English Literature minor who makes a mean zucchini loaf! Anne’s research at .txtLAB involves natural language processing, text mining, and computational analysis. Her projects right now are focused on uncovering institutional biases in print and visual media. Outside of Sherbrooke 688, Anne likes talking about her home state of Minnesota, playing video games, and trying to keep her ferns alive. Come by the lab for a chat together over coffee!

 

 

Jack Moncado is a second year student majoring in biochemistry or bio-organic chemistry (he isn’t sure yet). He has been a research assistant at .txtLab for several months now and is still confused by all the similarly named Parisian universities. His research centres around citation biases in academia and he enjoys eating food, cooking food and soccer – interests that he attributes to his Italian heritage. He would like to one day be a professor and hopes to model himself after Albert Einstein, though their greatest similarity will likely be disheveled hair.

 

 

Isabella Nikolaidas is a fourth-year student at McGill majoring in Linguistics with minors in Sociology as well as Computer Science. She has been working with .txtLAB since September and is very excited about continuing to deepen my understanding of cultural phenomena and biases through quantitative data analysis. Isabella loves pancakes, pranks, and when her scripts compile.

 

 

 

Brian Powell is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science. His current research projects investigate inequality in professional sports drafts and the citations of academic articles. He is a Montreal native whose passions include Liverpool FC, Ultimate Frisbee, and the works of George Gershwin. He also loves puns, Catch-22, and spewing useless Springsteen trivia!

 

 

 

Will Schumer is a first year student at McGill University in the English Cultural Studies and Art History programs. At .txtLab, he is working on a project analyzing biases in academic citations. Outside of that, he is interested in named entity recognition for spatial analysis. When not in the lab, he likes spending too much money on film media, and enjoys watching Fassbinder films.

 

 

 

Vicky Svaikovsky just completed her undergrad McGill, completing a double major in Linguistics and in French Literature, but don’t ask her anything about French literature (she doesn’t know). She is currently working on a research project at .txtLAB called Racial Lines that aims to understand racial and ethnic representation in Hollywood films through text mining, natural language processing, computational analysis, and statistical analysis. She is interested in sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and yelling about French bulldogs.

 

 

Lisa Teichmann is a PhD student in German and part of .txtLAB at the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Leiden University and a BA in Oriental Studies from the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the question of how computational text analysis methods and tools can form a repository for cross-cultural comparative literary analysis. Her research interests focus on literary geography, prestige and canonicity in literary education, reading, and translational literature.

 

Project Administrator

Beata Skazinetsky recently moved to Montreal from Toronto, where she worked in the project management field for many years. When she’s not busy at work, she loves curling up with a good book and a hot cup of tea, or discovering some of the amazing restaurants that this city has to offer!