معرفی
William Lamb is Professor in Gaelic Ethnology and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh's School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, with a joint affiliation to the Edinburgh Futures Institute. His academic journey includes a BA in Psychology from University of Maryland Baltimore County, MSc in Celtic Studies and PhD in Linguistics from University of Edinburgh, complemented by an MSc in Speech and Language Processing. Lamb's administrative roles encompass Departmental Director of Research, former Director of Learning and Teaching, and Acting Head of Department.
Lamb's research examines three interconnected domains: Scottish Gaelic linguistics (focusing on dialectology and corpus linguistics), traditional narrative (particularly formulaic language in oral storytelling), and Gaelic music (especially the historical connections between vocal traditions and instrumental dance music). His methodological approach combines ethnographic fieldwork with computational techniques like NLP and dialectometry.
His 15 most recent publications demonstrate a methodological evolution from traditional linguistic analysis toward computational approaches for Gaelic preservation. Early works focus on grammatical description and ethnographic documentation, while recent articles feature speech recognition systems, handwriting recognition for archival manuscripts, and cross-lingual text expansion techniques. Thematically, they cluster around language technology development (50%), morphological analysis (30%), and musicology (20%).
Lamb leads significant research initiatives including 'Gaelic Speech Recognition for Media, Education and Research' (£225k, Scottish Government) and the AHRC/IRC project 'Decoding Hidden Heritages in Gaelic Traditional Narrative with Text-Mining and Phylogenetics' (£405k). His team collaborates with BBC, MG Alba, and Tobar an Dualchais to develop Gaelic transcription technologies. Knowledge exchange activities include Gaelic dance-song workshops and a CD recording project with Greentrax Recordings.
He coordinates undergraduate courses including Scottish Studies, Traditional Narrative, and Gaelic Dialectology, and teaches postgraduate courses on traditional narrative and research methods. Lamb serves on external boards including Tobar an Dualchais, AHRC Peer Review College, and Faclair na Gàidhlig steering committee.
