- Lisa Baer-Tsarfati
- Affiliation:Department of History
- Supervisor: Dr. Elizabeth Ewan
- Dissertation Title: To Control a (Wo)Man’s Ambition: Gender, Class, and the Maintenance of Customary Authority in Early Modern Scotland, 1500–1625
- Bio: Lisa Baer-Tsarfati received her BSc (Hon.) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MSc by Research (with distinction) from the University of Edinburgh. Her research uses the computational analysis of discourse to examine the relationship between language, gender, and control. In 2020, Lisa’s 2019 International Review of Scottish Studies article was awarded the Tri-University History Essay Prize. She has also held a teaching fellowship at the University of Guelph and won a COA teaching award. Lisa is a member of CSDH, WHS, and NACBS and currently runs the Centre for Scottish Studies as the Assistant Director of Operations.
Tell us more about your Dissertation Topic: My dissertation explores the ways in which language was used to exert control in early modern Scotland, placing particular emphasis upon gender and the construction and regulation of ambition.
How does DH feature in your research, most broadly speaking: Lisa’s work relies heavily upon natural language processing, computational linguistics, semantic text analysis, and word embeddings (vector space modelling) to examine contemporaneous discourse texts relating to ambition in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland and England. In so doing, she makes an argument for the usefulness of word embeddings as an analytical tool for the study of historical language and its use in discourse.
Tell us something about the authors, projects, or ideas that inspire your thinking & research: Lisa’s first introduction to DH was through the Programming Historian Project, which inspired her to learn Python programming and to explore semantic text analysis as a tool for her doctoral research. Thus, her work owes much to the LSA techniques developed by Thomas Landauer and Scott Deerwester, while theoretically, it draws heavily from Foucault, Habermas, and Derrida, among others.