Jacob Thaisen
Short biography
I grew up in suburban Copenhagen, write about medieval England, and live in present-day Norway.
Note
My surname is pronounced [ˈtɑ̈jˀsən]. It is spelled with <sen> rather than <son>, as is common for Danish and Norwegian surnames.
Academic interests
History of the English language, Manuscript studies, Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Written language, Quantitative methodologies
PhD in Medieval English, De Montfort University, Leicester, supervised by Norman F. Blake
Master's in English and Humanities Computing, University of Copenhagen, supervised by Arne Zettersten
Associate Professor, University of Stavanger, 2010-16
Lecturer, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, 2005-10
I have rarely taught computational linguistics/digital humanities, although I have some professional and educational background in commercial machine translation and machine-assisted translation as well as in electronic editing, markup languages, and language models.
Variationist sociolinguistics and dialectology inform my research and publications, which have focused on orthographic and paleographical variation in medieval English and have usually employed quantitative analysis of quantitative data. It seems to me that the availability of diplomatic electronic transcripts of complete manuscripts opens up possibilities that have yet to be fully explored. In particular, NLP tools and multivariate statistical testing (such as regression) are standard tools in other areas of linguistics but are not yet commonly applied in studies of the scribal copy. They can help us identify the true predictor variables.
New projects and new collaborations are of potential interest by definition. Feel free to contact me.
Courses taught
I have taught and examined a variety of courses at BA, MA, and PhD levels. At UiO, I regularly teach these ones:
- Middle English, introduction (BA level, ENG2166)
- Middle English, introduction (MA level, ENG4166)
- English grammar (ENG1100)
- English phonetics and intonation (ENG1103)
- English medieval manuscript studies (ENG4120)
Awards
- Residential Fellowship, Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Residential Fellowship, Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
- MSCA Individual Fellowship (as supervisor)
Appointments
- Coordinator of the doctoral programme in Literacy Studies, University of Stavanger, 2011-14
Partners
Useful links
R (software environment for statistical computing)
SRILM (SRI Language Modeling Toolkit)
Advisory boards
Studia Neofilologiczne
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia
Former and current doctoral students
Hildegunn Støle
Kjetil Thengs
Geir Bergstrøm
Sara Alban Barcia
Sabina Nedelius
Nora Dörnbrack