Maria and Penelope are both UKRI Doctoral Fellow’s and joined the Digital Humanities Institute this year.
Maria Jimena Flores is a doctoral research fellow and part of the CASCADE Doctoral Network who is currently based at The University of Sheffield. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Languages from Universidad de las Américas Puebla in México and went on to complete a master’s degree in Linguistics and Literary studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussels under the Mastermind Scholarship Scheme. She has a wide variety of research interests including language teaching and language acquisition, Spanish as a Foreign language, corpus linguistics and lexicography. Her current research focuses on the development of new methods for historical thesauri creation by blending aspects of techniques like hierarchical structures, word embedding and linguistic concept modelling.
Penelope Gia Bao Huu Nguyen is a UKRI Doctoral Fellow on the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network, CASCADE. She is working on the automation of concepts through time via the automatic construction of an English-language historical thesaurus. Penelope holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from Can Tho University in Vietnam, where she first developed her passion for linguistics, particularly in the field of pragmatics. As a Fulbright scholar, she completed her master’s in Linguistics at Purdue University (USA), focusing on impoliteness and emoji usage on Vietnamese Facebook pages. Her research integrates computational and corpus linguistics to address questions that advance linguistic theory and interdisciplinary fields.