Mikko Laitinen

I work as Professor of English Language. Prior to this, I was in Linnaeus University in Sweden, where I am one of the two founding members of the Center of Data Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA), a multidisciplinary big data consortium. My research focuses on the role social networks in language variation and change in English, computational sociolinguistics, and on digital humanities.

We currently have two research projects. First, EvolvE is a research consortium that brings together experts from the UEF and TUNI, and it investigates the extent to which second language and non-native uses of English in the digital age are shaped by the same natural evolutionary processes that affect the established native varieties. Second, SOCOS is a digital humanities project that combines the methodologies of sociolinguistics and computer sciences at UEF. The objective is to improve access to and use of real-time language data in Twitter and to use these data to test how social network theory works on big data. The project has collaborators in the School of Computing at the UEF and in the Alan Turing Institute in London.