Hello, I'm Lisa.

I’m a historian, computational linguist, and AI ethics researcher. I study how language operationalizes power — how moral categories get built, how they move from discourse into policy, and how they end up embedded in the institutions and technologies that govern people’s lives.

My research asks how concepts such as legitimacy, ambition, risk, and deviance are produced through language, and how those categories shape governance, both past and present. I am particularly interested in moments when systems present themselves as neutral or inevitable, while quietly reproducing older structures of exclusion and control.

This site brings together my research, public scholarship, and education and literacy work. It is not a portfolio in the commercial sense, but a record of questions pursued across disciplines and contexts.

My Philosophy

I believe that technology is never neutral, and neither is scholarship. Every classification system, interface, model, and metric encodes assumptions about whose knowledge counts and whose interests are protected.

Responsible innovation is not simply a matter of efficiency or scale. It requires accountability, interpretability, and attention to power, especially where systems operate at a distance from those they affect. Progress without accountability is not progress at all; it is convenience dressed up as inevitability.

I am guided by a simple, persistent question: who does this serve, and at what cost? That question applies as much to archives and curricula as it does to algorithms and policy frameworks.

Credentials Are Dull. Context Is Everything.

I did not arrive at questions of AI, governance, and ethics by way of an MBA or a start-up incubator. My route was academic: a PhD in history and language, a sustained engagement with digital humanities methods, and a growing recognition that many of the dynamics I was tracing in early modern sources were reappearing—largely unacknowledged—in contemporary information systems.

My doctoral research used computational linguistic methods to recover historically grounded meanings of political concepts, resisting the tendency to project modern assumptions onto the past. That work demonstrated how language has long been used to define legitimacy, discipline behaviour, and mark certain voices as dangerous or illegible.

Once you have seen those patterns in centuries-old texts, it becomes difficult not to notice their re-emergence in contemporary systems of classification, moderation, and automated decision-making.

From Archives to Algorithms

Rather than treating digital systems as a break from the past, my work approaches them as part of a longer history of governance through information. I am interested less in whether a system is “innovative” than in what it inherits: whose values it encodes, what it renders visible, and what it makes difficult to contest.

That orientation travels across contexts. Whether the subject is a sixteenth-century proclamation or a contemporary content moderation policy, the analytical work is the same: read the language carefully, ask what it assumes, trace how those assumptions became rules, and follow the rules to see whose interests they protect. Critical humanistic training turns out to be remarkably useful when the texts in question are terms of service agreements, algorithmic impact assessments, and AI governance frameworks.

The common thread is not sector, but method: careful attention to language, structure, and power.

What This Site Is

This site is a working record of scholarly commitments: to rigour, to ethical responsibility, and to the careful examination of systems that shape how knowledge is produced and used.

If you are here because you study these questions, work on them professionally, or simply live inside systems you were never invited to understand, this site is for you. Not because it offers simple answers, but because it insists on better questions.