Description
Lorella Viola is a Postdoctoral researcher in Historical Linguistics and Digital Humanities. She holds a PhD in Language and Communication Studies awarded by the University of East Anglia (UK) and an MA in Translation and Cultural Mediation from the University of Udine (Italy). Within her PhD, she developed an empirical method to investigate media-induced language change in Italian; this research has been published in internationally recognised academic journals such as the Journal of Historical Linguistics, the Italian Journal of Linguistics, and the Journal of Historical Pragmatics.
Her current research focusses on the application of Digital Humanities and Discourse Analysis tools to explore issues of language and cultural change. After a number of post-docs (of which one funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council) (AHRC), she is now the project leader of one of the five Work Packages of the international research project “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914” (OcEx) funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the fourth Digging into Data challenge. OcEx brings together leading efforts in computational periodicals research from the nine academic partners in US, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth-century newspapers by linking digitised newspaper corpora currently siloed in national collections.