Dan Villarreal

Dr. Dan Villarreal is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. As a computational sociolinguist, Dan's scholarly work sits at the nexus of two research traditions: bringing together computational methods and sociolinguistic perspectives. In particular, his research seeks to expand sociolinguists' research toolkits by making computational techniques and sociolinguistic data accessible and usable; explore how speakers and listeners make sense of the tremendous phonetic variability that characterizes everyday speech; and foster a computational sociolinguistics (and a linguistics more broadly) that addresses its research questions faster, better, and more equitably. His recent work has investigated computational methods to automatically code sociophonetic variation (and how to make these methods equitable), gender segregation and speech communities in New Zealand, and whether Open Methods in linguistics contribute to academic colonialism. His research has been published in Language Variation and Change, Laboratory Phonology, and the Journal of Pragmatics. Dan pronounces his last name [ˌvɪləɹiˈæl].

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6070-1138
GitHub: www.github.com/djvill