Lorella Viola holds a PhD in Language and Communication Studies from the University of East Anglia - UEA (UK) and an MA in Translation and Cultural Mediation from the University of Udine (Italy). Within her PhD, she developed a data-driven, corpus-based method to investigate media-induced language change in Italian.
After an AHRC funded postdoc at UEA - during which she implemented an extensive Outreach plan for the Faculty of Humanities, she joined Utrecht University in 2018. She was Work Package leader of Oceanic Exchanges (OcEx), a Digging into Data challenge project funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO). OcEx examined patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth-century newspapers by linking digitised newspaper corpora previously siloed in national collections.
In parallel with her research strand in Historical Linguistics, she has focussed on developing Digital Humanities methodologies that combine both quantitative and qualitative analysis and assist humanities scholars to contextualize and unveil the patterns hidden within large digital collections. One of her latest works is the GeoNewsMiner (GNM), an Open Access app that interactively displays geographical references in a textual collection. She has also released two fully Open Access historical newspapers collections of Italian American immigrant newspapers, ChroniclItaly and ChroniclItaly 2.0.
Lorella has recently joined C2DH to work with Sean Takats on the DHARPA Project. The team is building software to facilitate computational analysis, replicability, transparency, Open Access publication, standardization and research dissemination.