Joshua Wilson Black

Philosophy | Linguistics | Digital Humanities

Background image: MS page from Charles Sanders Peirce's "Issues of Pragmaticism" (source)

I’m Joshua Wilson Black, a Post Doctoral Fellow at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour | Te Kahui Roro Reo at the University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha. My research interests span philosophy, linguistics, data science, and digital humanities. In all these fields, I seek insight into sign use, understood broadly, and how it fits in to our picture of the wider world.

My current primary research interest is in sociophonetics, where I investigate the dynamics of vowel spaces over time and within conversations and the early onset of vernacular reorganisation using large-scale corpus analysis.

Interests
  • Analysis of Text and Audio Corpora
  • Clustering and Classification
  • History of Philosophy (esp. Charles Sanders Peirce and the Pragmatist Tradition)
  • Language Change
Education
  • Master of Applied Data Science, 2021

    University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

  • PhD in Philosophy, 2017

    University of Sheffield

  • MA in Philosophy, 2013

    University of Waikato | Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato

  • BSc(Hons) in Mathematics and Philosophy, 2012

    University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

  • BA in Philosophy and BSc in Mathematics, 2011

    University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour | Te Kahui Roro Reo  
_University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha_
Post Doctoral Fellow
Feb 2021 – Present Christchurch, New Zealand | Ōtautahi, Aotearoa

Research on the Marsden funded projects:

  • Towards and improved theory of language change, and
  • Understanding the onset of vernacular reorganisation.

Key technologies and methods used include:

  • LaBB-CAT, the NZILBB corpus analysis tool,
  • Principal Component Analysis and Generalised Additive (Mixed) Models, and
  • R and the tidyverse package collection.
 
 
 
 
 
UC Arts Digital Lab  
_University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha_
Lead Research Assistant
Jun 2020 – Feb 2021 Christchurch, New Zealand | Ōtautahi, Aotearoa
Interviews and data processing for the UC QuakeBox: Take 2 project.
 
 
 
 
 
Department of Philosophy  
_University of Sheffield_
Graduate Teaching Fellow
Feb 2014 – Aug 2018 Sheffield, United Kingdom

Teaching across a wide range of philosophy modules. Course design and lecturing for:

  • Reason and Argument, an introductory module on informal logic, and
  • Mathematical Skills for Arts and Humanities.

Posts

Publications

(2022). Peirce on Metaphysics and Common Sense Belief: A Challenge to Hookway’s Account. Upcoming volume in honour of Christopher Hookway.

PDF

(2022). The Overlooked Effect of Amplitude on Within-Speaker Vowel Variation. Under review.

(2022). Creating Specialised Corpora from Digitised Historical Newspaper Archives. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Cite Paper OSF

(2022). Using Principal Component Analysis to Explore Co-Variation of Vowels. Language and Linguistics Compass.

Cite Paper GitHub DOI