Dr Seth Mehl
PhD
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities
- Profile
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I am Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), and Co-Director of the University of 91̽»¨ . I teach and conduct research in corpus linguistics, semantics, community archiving, co-production methodologies, and digital culture.
I have been at the University of 91̽»¨ since 2015. From 2011 to 2015, I was a research and teaching fellow at the at University College London (UCL), where I also completed my PhD in English and MA in English Linguistics.
I am a member of , the Advisory Forum, and the . I was a council member of Britain’s oldest learned society, , from 2012 to 2020.
- Research interests
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I am primarily active in two broad research areas: corpus semantics and community archiving.
My recent corpus semantic research focuses on words with multiple contested meanings, which lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate and personal conversation: for example, decolonisation, gentrification, appropriation, fundamentalism, and white. These contentious multiple meanings often include newly emerging senses, and exhibit increasing vagueness. They also lead to potentially grave social, cultural, political, and material consequences.
I lead on the DHI’s concept modelling research, based on the project and subsequent collaborations with the and the .
My is primarily conducted in collaboration with a team of academic and non-academic researchers in rural South Africa, and employs community- led co-production methods. That work has supported the creation of community archives in the form of ‘live’ records of unfolding events; and records of the living memories of older adults; as a means for building capacity and exploring concepts of development and identity.
As Co-Director of the , I support community archiving by racially marginalised PhD students at the University of 91̽»¨; and facilitate co-production between racially marginalised PhD students and local and regional social and racial justice organisations.
My recent and ongoing externally funded projects include:
- . Office for Students and Research England. (As Co-Director).
- . AHRC. (As Principal Investigator).
- . Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. (As Co-Investigator).
- . AHRC Urgency Grant. (As Principal Investigator).
. AHRC GCRF Network Plus Funding. (As Principal Investigator).
- Publications
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Books
- Keywords for Today A 21st Century Vocabulary. Oxford University Press.
Journal articles
- . Transactions of the Philological Society, 120(3), 397-398.
- . Transactions of the Philological Society, 120(3), 474-488.
- . Journal of World Languages.
- . Sustainable Production and Consumption.
- . Lexis(16).
- . English World-Wide, 41(3), 352-367.
- . World Englishes, 37(2), 185-206.
- . Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 0(0).
- . English Language and Linguistics.
- . Studia Neophilologica, 89(S1), 21-38.
- English language: Lexicography, lexicology and lexical semantics. The Year's Work in English Studies, 35-43.
- . Critical Quarterly.
- . Critical Quarterly.
- . International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
- . Journal of English Linguistics, 007542422110190-007542422110190.
Chapters
- Comparing Baselines for Corpus Analysis: Research into the Get-Passive in Speech and Writing In Schützler O & Schlüter J (Ed.), Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics: Comparative Approaches
- In Kristiansen G, Franco K, De Pascale S, Rosseel L & Zhang W (Ed.) De Gruyter
- Measuring lexical co-occurrence statistics against a part-of-speech baseline In Parviainen H, Kaunisto M & Pahta P (Ed.), Corpus Approaches into World Englishes and Language Contrasts Helsinki: VAIRENG E-SERIES.
- Language Learning at Your Fingertips: Deploying Corpora in Mobile Teaching Apps In Corrigan K & Mearns A (Ed.), Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement (pp. 211-211). Springer
- , Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics (pp. 53-82). John Benjamins Publishing Company
Book reviews
- . Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 18(1), 152-156.
- . Journal of English Linguistics, 44(2), 189-192.
- . English Language and Linguistics, 17(3), 571-576.
Website content
- Investigating the linguistic DNA of life, body, and soul.
Working papers
- . Transactions of the Philological Society, 120, 474-488.
- Keywords for Today A 21st Century Vocabulary. Oxford University Press.
- Teaching interests
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I welcome PhD applications related to corpus linguistics, semantics, Keywords, lexicography and lexicology, community archiving, and digital humanities.
- Teaching activities
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I am the DHI’s Director of Postgraduate Research.
I contribute to teaching on the DHI’s MA in Digital Culture and Communication and MA in Cultural Data Management and Communication. With the other members of the team behind those programmes, I received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Learning and Teaching in Collaborative Activities in 2022. I am module leader for IPA61003, Language Analysis, AI, and Culturomics, and I deliver teaching and supervision for IPA61005 Introduction to Digital Culture, and IPA61006, Digital Culture and Cultural Data e-Portfolio.
I am Co-Director of the University of 91̽»¨ , which works to improve the postgraduate research experience for students of colour.
Links