LAMA Lab Welcomes Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Elizabeth Phillips

The LAMA Lab is happy to welcome Elizabeth Phillips, who received the Research Excellence Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Toronto this summer. Elizabeth is embarking on a two-year research project under Dr. der Nederlanden's supervision, focusing on the past, present, and future of oral storytelling.

To launch the project, Elizabeth will soon begin collecting oral narratives from people around the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). She hopes to create what will become the first major archive of stories, poems, songs, lullabies, prayers, chants, and other oral traditions from across cultures and languages. Beyond contributing to the preservation and appreciation of intangible cultural heritage, she plans to use the archive to help answer fundamental questions about why certain stories endure across generations while others disappear. Elizabeth will computationally analyze the recordings contributed to the archive to identify key acoustic and structural features that distinguish storytelling forms such as plays, songs, and poetry. Herself a cognitive scientist and musician, she plans to collaborate with linguists, anthropologists, and digital humanities experts to maximize the project's longevity and impact.

She hopes the archive will also provide an opportunity to compare personally- and culturally-meaningful human narratives to stories generated by AI. She is interested in whether AI can reproduce not only the acoustic structure of oral narratives, but also the qualities that make them memorable, socially meaningful, and worthy of being passed from one generation to the next.

Elizabeth joined the LAMA team in late June and has been enjoying getting to know her fellow lab members, biking to campus along the Nine Creeks Trail, and contributing to (and partaking in) her shared office's communal snack cupboard. She has already stocked the kitchen with decaf coffee and herbal tea to get her through the afternoon slump after the LAMA Lab's weekly meeting and music social. She is excited to get to work collecting stories--just as soon as she returns from a trip to Turkey with her fiancée!

Starting in August and over the next year, Elizabeth looks forward to meeting storytellers of any genre from across the GTHA, building new collaborations, and sharing updates as the project develops. If you're interested in learning more, or contributing your own recordings, please don't hesitate to get in touch.