Humanities

For me, the humanities start with language.

I’m interested in how people use language, how it is structured, how it changes and how we can represent it clearly enough to study. Once a language question needs to be made precise, computing and mathematics start to become useful. A problem that begins with grammar can turn into notation, data analysis or code surprisingly quickly.

Latin turns up here a lot. I like it, which helps. It also happens to be a particularly useful language to work with: it has a long and complicated textual history, while still raising very modern questions about grammar, text processing, notation and digital scholarship.

Language is only part of the story. Texts came from people, places and particular moments in history. Literature, ideas and material culture matter if you want to understand them properly. So this page moves between all things linguistics, classics, literature, history and the digital methods used to study them. I don’t try too hard to keep those boundaries tidy.