2017-18

Theodorus Fransen

Theodorus is a 4th-year Irish Research Council-funded Ph.D. student in the Centre for Language and Communication Studies in Trinity College Dublin. Hailing from the south-east of The Netherlands, he has deeply immersed himself in the Irish traditional music and Irish language scene since his arrival in Ireland in 2010. With third-level degrees in Celtic Studies, Linguistics and Speech and Language Processing, his research focus is highly interdisciplinary. His research interests comprise Natural Language Processing for historical text, historical morphology and phonology, orthographical variation and standardisation and digital lexicography, mainly in the Irish context. His teaching experience includes undergraduate courses in statistics and computational morphology.

Theodorus' current research project can be situated at the intersection of historical and computational linguistics for Irish. The goal of the project is to create and employ computational methods and digital resources to link up Irish cognate verb forms across time. The broader aim of the thesis is to remediate the linguistic disconnect between the present and the past. As such, his work promotes collaboration between Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities and will hopefully provide new avenues for digital textual scholarship for Irish. As a Graduate Fellow he looks forward to sharing ideas and collaborating with the Trinity Long Room Hub community in the academic year 2017-2018.