Barbara is a digital humanist and computational linguist. Before joining King's in 2021, Barbara was Turing research fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and at the University of Cambridge between 2017 and 2021. Before that, she worked as language technologist in the Dictionary division of Oxford University Press and as data scientist in the Open Research Group of Springer Nature. She obtained her PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2010, after a Master's degree in Mathematics and a Bachelor's degree in Classics from the University of Firenze (Italy). She is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Open Humanities Data and convenor of the MA programme in Digital Humanities at King’s. 

Research interests and PhD supervision

My research interests lie at the intersection between computational and quantitative methods and research questions in the Humanities. I am particularly interested in the following topics:

• Computational models of word meaning.
• Analysis of semantic change via quantitative and computational methods in ancient languages (Latin and ancient Greek), historical texts and in contemporary data.
• Time-aware natural language processing.
• Computational lexicography.
• Open data publishing in the humanities.

 

Selected Publications

• McGillivray B, Alahapperuma M, Cook J, Di Bonaventura C, Merono Penuela A, Tyson G et al. Leveraging time-dependent lexical features for offensive language detection. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop of Ever Evolving NLP, EMNLP 2022. 2022 
• McGillivray B, Jenset GB, Salama K, Schut D. Investigating patterns of change, stability, and interaction among scientific disciplines using embeddings. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. 2022 Dec;9(1). 285. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01267-5
• Pedrazzini N, McGillivray B. Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities. Association for Computational Linguistics. 2022. p. 85
• McGillivray B, Marongiu P, Pedrazzini N, Ribary M, Wigdorowitz M, Zordan E. Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Publications. 2022 Oct 14.
• Perrone V, Hengchen S, Palma M, Vatri A, Smith JQ, McGillivray B. Lexical semantic change for Ancient Greek and Latin: Computational approaches to semantic change. In Computational approaches to semantic change (Volume 6). Language Science Press. 2021

 

Teaching

I teach a range of topics, including text processing and quantitative text analysis, social and cultural analytics, data analysis with R, introduction to Python programming, data visualisation, natural language processing, and quantitative methods for the the humanities. 

 

Expertise and Public Engagement 

Barbara's research was featured in the Christmas 2020 edition of the Economist "How data analysis can enrich the liberal arts" and in the New Scientist and BBC.

In 2022 she was awarded the Inter Circle U. Prize for inter- and trans-disciplinary research for her work on the project “The Language of Mechanisation”.