My name is Kate Lyons. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research interests include the semiotics of social media and study of Linguistic Landscapes.
I am currently working on two main projects: (1) an investigation of the Linguistic Landscapes of gentrified areas in the Mission District, San Francisco; Pilsen, Chicago and South Delhi, India and (2) research on the semiotic processes of Internet memes and the social organization of social media platforms. I combine qualitative and quantitative methods and engage in cross-disciplinary approaches drawing chiefly from sociolinguistics; corpus linguistics and computational linguistics.
You can download my CV here.
My dissertation explores the semiotic landscape of the Mission District in San Francisco. I use interviews, a catalog of the Mission’s Linguistic Landscape and mined geo-tagged social media data to present observations on (1) the social effects of gentrification on linguistic vitality and (2) the meta-semiotic processes by which gentrification as a concept and the Mission as a place are constructed.
Please see my Github pages site for tutorials in working with social media data, map, census and other geographically configured data in R!