Barbara's research focusses on lexical resources for ancient languages and she has broad experience in corpus and computational methods in lexical semantics and their application in digital humanities. She holds a degree in Mathematics and one in Classics from the University of Firenze (Italy), and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Pisa (2010). She has worked as a language technologist in the Dictionaries division of Oxford University Press and as a data scientist in the Open Research Group of Springer Nature. She has also been a Turing research fellow at the University of Cambridge and at The Alan Turing Institute. She founded and convenes the Turing Humanities and Data Science special interest group. Her current research focusses on computational models of meaning and conceptual change in historical and contemporary texts and she is Principal Investigator of the ERC-selected project COALA (Computational Corpus Annotation for Quantitative Analysis of Latin Lexical Semantics) funded by UK Research and Innovation (€2M). Her most recent book is Applying Language Technology in Humanities Research. Design, Application, and the Underlying Logic (co-authored with Gábor Mihály Tóth, Palgrave Macmillan 2020).
She is convenor of the MA programme in Digital Humanities at King's. She is also very interested in supporting open data in Humanities research and has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Open Humanities Data since 2019 and is Open Research Lead for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
