Dana Roemling is on the Applied Linguistics Pathway at the University of Birmingham; their research examines how regional linguistic variation such as dialects, can be used to help law enforcement find the authors of online communication.

Dana undertook a three-month long Overseas Institutional Visit at the University of Helsinki, Finland from February to May 2024.

Dana’s placement at the University of Helsinki allowed them to engage with a variety of academic activities and to network with a variety of experts in their field. Dana attended weekly seminars, a workshop on multimodality as well as a variety of talks, seminars and reading groups at the University of Helsinki.

 

Dana’s OIV enabled them to develop skills that are directly useful for their PhD. In addition to attending advanced Finnish language modules, Dana learned how to use QGIS for map creation enabling them to better visualise their results, as well as learning Python and Overleaf/LaTeX.

“The visit will, without a doubt, have a positive impact on both my PhD research and my future career. Given my new skills and knowledge, I will be able to include a study on machine learning in forensic linguistic authorship profiling in my thesis. But even if that wasn’t the case, the knowledge and skills will be highly relevant to my field and to future research as well.”

During their visit, Dana presented their research at a number of Universities throughout Finland and also submitted a paper to NLPAICS conference.

Speaking about the visit, Dana said that:

“[T]he OIV has not only met the aims of the application, but what I was able to learn and output, and the networks I have formed, exceed my expectations by far.”

Interested in an Overseas Institutional Visit? Find out more here or get in touch with us on ESRCdtp@warwick.ac.uk