We are delighted to welcome James Tauber as a PhD candidate in the Text and Language Lab, led by Prof. Michaela Mahlberg in the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies.
James’s doctoral research explores linguistic variation in narrative fiction, combining corpus linguistics, computational narratology, and natural language processing. His work focuses on how language varies within fiction, including differences between narration, dialogue, character speech, description, and representations of thought. One of his major case studies will be the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.
After completing a linguistics degree at the University of Western Australia in 1990s, he was involved in the development of web standards such as XML and worked in the tech industry for over twenty years before returning to a focus on software for education and digital humanities including work for the Perseus Digital Library.
James gained graduate qualifications in Ancient Greek, Germanic Philology, and Educational Measurement before completing an MA in Corpus Linguistics at Lancaster University. His doctoral work at FAU is focused on linguistic variation in narrative fiction with a particular focus on Tolkien.
His other research interests include text and music encoding, Ancient Greek morphology, and corpus-driven historical language learning. James leads the Digital Tolkien Project which won a Tolkien Society Award in 2025. He is a Fellow of the Python Software Society and the Royal Society of Arts.