Richard West-Soley
PhD Linguistics & English Language
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: s2137644@sms.ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Dugald Stewart Building
- City
- 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
Qualifications
University of Oxford (Somerville College), 1995-1999
BA (Hons) in Modern Languages (German and Spanish)
University of Birmingham, 2001-2002
PGCE Secondary Teaching Certificate in Modern Foreign Languages
The Open University, 2010-2015
BSc in Social Sciences (Psychology and Sociology)
The University of Edinburgh, 2020-2022
MSc in Linguistics (Distinction)
- Full stack web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP)
- Experienced app developer (Swift/SwiftUI for iOS/macOS, Haxe, Flutter)
Undergraduate teaching
LEL 2C, Historical Linguistics
Research summary
My research focuses on the enregisterment of the Black Country English (BCE) dialect through newsprint in the 19th and 20th Centuries. As part of this research, I am working closely with materials from the British Newspaper Archive, compiling an extensive corpus of BCE texts tagged for multiple levels of linguistic analysis.
Alongside my dialect research, I am developing and extending methodologies for working with degraded or poorly encoded textual archive material, including the use of machine learning and LLM tools for text processing and tagging.