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My background is primarily in linguistics, but I have become an active computer programmer, working mostly on projects related to linguistics. I find that being both a developer and a linguist helps tremendously in the software design process. My favorite programming language is probably Perl, due to its expressiveness, compactness, and excellent text-processing capabilities, and the speed of development it allows. At present I am also doing a lot of work in Java, which is excellent for creating and distributing solid, cross-platform graphical applications. I also mess about with other languages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and related technologies such as XML, XSLT, and LZX.

I have designed various types of linguistic annotation software (coding tools) for performing analysis of transcripts of spoken language, and large corpora of written language. This has been done mostly through grant-funded research projects.

My main project at the moment is Dexter, a powerful and free set of tools for analyzing linguistic data. This project is funded by the Spencer Foundation. I am hoping that Dexter will prove useful to linguists, educational researchers, and anyone else who wants to facilitate hand-crafted analyses of language data. I’m still looking for beta-testers, so please take a look and let me know if you’d like to try it out.

I make some programs I have written freely available for others to use. Check out my Software page.

I also do a small amount of web design and currently maintain the following websites:

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