Personal Statement
I am a researcher and teacher in Applied Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool. My publications to date use a mixed methods approach (combining corpus and critical discourse analysis tools and techniques) to explore how language is used in different contexts. At present, I am focusing on two key areas: the language of cyber security and the language of migration.

Cyber security
For this project I am exploring the communication of cyber risk from two perspectives:
1) Challenges faced by cyber practitioners and cyber security training and awareness specialists in communicating risk, prioritising information and explaining technical issues to non-expert audiences.
2) Challenges faced by industry employees and the general public in understanding, interpreting and evaluating information relating to cyber risk.
This involves creating a fully annotated corpus of cyber materials, which will then be analysed from three perspectives: genre (the way the texts are structured/organised), register (the language contained within the texts) and multi-modality (the use of visuals to convey key information and ideas). The final stage of the project will involve working with industry partners and policy makers to carry out a series of focus group studies to examine the relationship between language use and decision-making. Specifically, what sort of linguistic factors influence the way in which readers understand and assess risks, threats and consequences.

The language of migration
The second area of research relates to the digitisation, annotation and analysis of historical migrant letter collections. I am especially interested in how a transhistorical and comparative approach to analysing such letter collections can help us to understand the migrant experience today. At present, I am working on an interdisciplinary project that uses two large letter corpora (around 10,000 letters by German and Irish migrants to America during the late 18th to early 20th century) to explore how the two groups integrated into American life and culture in similar and/or different ways. To do this, we are using computational tools to look for patterns in the language which reveal something about how the migrants conceptualised ‘home’ and ‘community’, how they self-identified (as Irish, German, American, for example), how they maintained relationships with those back home, and, importantly, if/how their experiences and perceptions changed over time. Whilst my background is primarily in corpus linguistics (I completed my PhD in corpus linguistics at the University of Birmingham), my research approach is very much interdisciplinary and I have been fortunate to work with colleagues in the fields of history, migration studies and international relations, both in Europe and the US.

I would be interested in supervising doctoral work in any of the areas mentioned above.

My academic support and feedback hours are Mondays 12-1 and Thursdays 1-2, or by appointment.

Research Overview
Below is information about some of the projects that I have worked on.

Project title: Transnational networks among European missionaries in colonial Australia: building a digital repository of epistolary correspondence
Funder: University of Western Australia Research Collaboration Award
Date: January - December 2018
My role: Co-investigator
This project was led by Professor John Kinder at the University of Western Australia, Perth. The aims were to digitise and annotate historical missionary letters located in archives around Australia and to then analyse those letters (using computational methods) for: (1) the experiential dimension of missionaries, singly and as members of networks, and (2) the emotional dimension of the relationships, especially friendships, that were maintained by the correspondence.

Project Title: Evaluating Cyber Security Evidence for Policy Advice
Funder: EPSRC
Date: March 2017 - March 2019
My Role: Research Assistant
Website: www.ecsepa.coventry.ac.uk
This project, led by Madeline Carr (UCL) and Siraj Shaikh (Coventry University), examined the ways in which cyber evidence is interpreted, evaluated and assessed by policy makers. The key aims of the project were to: 1) evaluate what exactly constitutes the evidence presented to and accessed by policy advisors, how they privilege and order that evidence and what the quality of that evidence is; 2) identify the particular challenges of decision making in this context and evaluate how effectively policy makers make use of evidence for giving advice, and 3) develop a framework to assess the effectiveness of evidence-based cyber security policy making that can be used to make recommendations for improvement and that can be re-applied to other cohorts. My role on this project was to use corpus and computational methods of analysis to explore the language of different types of cyber evidence.

Project title: Digitising Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections
Funder: AHRC Research Networking Grant
Date: April 2013 - June 2014
My role: Co-Investigator
Website: www.lettersofmigration.blogspot.com
The purpose of this research network was to discuss some of the challenges surrounding the digitisation of historical migrant letter collections and to look at ways of capturing and representing information about letters (the participants involved and their locations, for instance) using TEI markup. Our key aims were to 1) improve interconnectivity between existing digital collections of migrant correspondence, 2) provide a forum to address the complex issues surrounding the accessibility, intellectual property rights and privacy of all those contributing to the creation of digital correspondence collections, 3) encourage and investigate new ways of organizing, interpreting, and using the various types of information embedded within digitised migrant correspondence, 4) improve access to digital resources of interest to academics, the general public, and a broad range of cultural and creative industries and 5) promote international collaboration.

Project title: New Connections: The BT e-Archive Project
Funder: JISC: Strand B of the JISC eContent Capital Programme
Date: December 2011 - July 2013
My role: Co-lead for the research team working on correspondence
Website: http://www.digitalarchives.bt.com/web/arena/research/hilary-emma
This project was a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage and The National Archive. The key aims of the project were to catalogue, digitise and develop a searchable online archive of almost half a million photographs, images, documents and correspondence assembled by BT over 165 years. As part of this project a research team was set-up to work specifically with the letter component of the archive. This involved digitising and marking-up 500 letters which could then be searched in various ways, allowing users to carry out diachronic studies of business correspondence, examining how the language and the genre evolves over a 100 year period.

Project title: Increasing interoperability between corpus tools
Funder: JISC: Strand D
Date: February - July 2012
My role: Project Manager
The aim of this project was to introduce corpus linguistics methods to research communities who are engaged in the study of language from different perspectives, and who have previously drawn on only a limited range of corpus software, or none at all. It explored ways of linking different corpus query tools so that users can investigate aspects of the same data in a variety of ways. The number of tools that can interlink depends on software configurations and the willingness of other software developers to incorporate interoperability features. For this project, we offered a prototype tool to link the WordTree, Intellitext, CQPweb and Wmatrix (four core tools developed at Coventry University, the University of Leeds and Lancaster University).

Project title: Adaptable and learnable user interfaces for research tools: The Word Tree Corpus Interface
Funder: JISC: Strand C
Date: May - December 2011
My role: Project Manager
The aim of this project was to develop a multi-dimensional Word Tree interface which would allow users to search and browse within documents and across a corpus, and access instant visual representation of the language patterns surrounding any given word or phrase. The goal was to increase access and usage of corpus resources, both by corpus linguists and by language teachers and learners.