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Dr. Mark Faulkner

Associate Professor (English)
      
Profile Photo

Dr. Mark Faulkner

Associate Professor (English)

 faulknem@tcd.ie

 


I joined the School of English at Trinity in September 2016 after four years as Lecturer in Medieval English at the University of Sheffield. I completed my D. Phil at Oxford under the supervision of the late palaeographer M. B. Parkes. Partly in tribute to Malcolm, I co-edited the three-volume History of Punctuation in English Literature, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2025 with Jeff Guttierez, John Lennard and Elizabeth Bonapfel. I began academic life a literary historian and have become variously a historical linguist, book historian, corpus linguist and digital humanist: in sum, a philologist. I am particularly known for my work on late Old English and early Middle English, especially my New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literary History Between Old and Middle English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won the ISSEME First Monograph Award in 2023, and was described in The Review of English Studies as 'a field-changing contribution to scholarship' and 'formidable achievement'. I am currently editing A Critical Anthology of Twelfth-Century English for Arc Humanities Press. Since 2016, with the help of over €1m of funding f rom Trinity, the Irish Research Council and Enterprise Ireland, I have been developing a corpus philology that seeks to apply corpus-linguistic, statistical and computational approaches to bring a new sense of quantitative precision to our understanding of the medieval textual record, and now work with a large research group of undergraduate, graduate and PhD students on these topics. Between 2022 and 2024, I was PI on the IRC-Coalesce-funded project, Searobend: Linked Metadata for English-Language Texts, 1000-1300, a collaboration with Prof. Declan O'Sullivan (Computer Science). I currently hold Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme, FAHSS Benefactions and Research Boost funding for Ansund: Using Machine Learning to Develop a New, Exhaustive, Open Access Corpus of Old English, a collaboration with Elisabetta Magnanti (Vienna). I am also PI of Wandering Books, a TCD group-based Research Doctoral project, with four PhD students collaborating between English, Genetics and History, to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to localising medieval manuscripts and a partner in Erasmus+-funded network Antidote (Advanced Techniques for Editing Older Texts), based at the University of Reyjkavik and with partners in Prague, Venice, Lyon, Bratislava and the monastery of Klosterneuburg in Austria. I am a frequent speaker at international conferences on medieval literature, historical linguistics and medieval book history. I delivered plenary lectures at the 43rd Symposium on Old English, Middle English and Historical Linguistics in the Low Countries (Leiden, 2021), the 43rd International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Sheffield, 2023) and the 13th International Conference on Middle English (Málaga, 2024). At Trinity, I co-developed the manuscript-focused, interdisciplinary M. Phil in Medieval Studies, which launched in 2019 and which I directed from 2019-2022. I have also worked extensively with the Library to showcase Trinity's world-class collection of medieval manuscripts. In 2017/8, in partnership with the Long Room Hub and the Library I organised a series of public lectures on Trinity's manuscripts entitled Beyond the Book of Kells. I have also organised conferences on individual Trinity manuscripts, such as the Dublin Apocalypse (MS. 64), and been active in the Library's Carnegie-and Arcadia-Funded Manuscripts for Medieval Studies [rojects, which have so far seen the digitisation of forty manuscripts, including the famous Book of St Albans (MS. 177). I led the development of the new Trinity Centre for the Book in 2022, and am now its inaugural Director. I was elected a Fellow of Trinity and to the Board of the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England in 2023.
  Digital Humanities - Computational Philology   Early Middle English   Historical Linguistics   Literary History   manuscript studies   Old English
Project Title
 Big Dating: Using Big Data to Date Medieval Texts
From
2019
To
2023
Summary
The transition from Old to Middle English in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries has been described as 'the most dramatic change in the English language' (van Gelderen), yet also as 'the textual "black hole"' in its history (Curzan). Historians of both English literature and the English language routinely treat it as inscrutable. Yet the period is not, in fact, inscrutable. It is relatively easy to assemble a brief list of English texts that can be securely attributed to the twelfth century and show that this inscrutability is more imagined than real. This raises the possibility that numerous texts that have always been assumed to be Old or early Middle English on the basis of the very questionable assumption that there was little or no composition in English in the twelfth century might also belong to that period. This project continues the programme of reinstating the twelfth century into English literary and linguistic histories by producing a handlist of texts written in that period, achieving in so doing significant advances in methods for dating undated medieval texts. In particular, the funding secured from the Provost's Project Awards will be used to recruit a historical linguist with training in quantitative and perhaps computational methods to develop 'big data' techniques to assist in the process of dating texts from this period.
Funding Agency
Trinity College Dublin
Programme
Provost's Project Award
Project Title
 Big Data and Medieval Texts
From
01/01/17
To
30/09/17
Summary
Numerous large corpora of medieval texts have been built over the last thirty years, collectively comprising over ten million words. However, they were built for varied purposes and have different user interfaces and search protocols. This project seeks to explore the possibilities for harnessing the enormous collective potential of this big data as a tool for cultural, historical, literary and linguistic analyses through the organisation of an international colloquium, and networking towards future international, collaborative funding bids to develop new overarching interrogation techniques.
Funding Agency
Irish Research Council
Programme
New Foundations Scheme
Project Title
 Trinity Corpus of Old English from the Twelfth Century (TOXIIC)
From
31/01/2017
To
30/09/2019
Summary
The transition from Old to Middle English in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries has been been described as 'the most dramatic change in the English language' (van Gelderen), yet also as 'the textual "black hole"' in its history (Curzan). This perception has meant that some of the most basic questions of literary history, such as where and when particular texts were written, have been regarded as unanswerable. Yet this transitional period appears a black hole only because a significant category of evidence, late copies of Old English texts, has been systematically ignored. This body of material comprises 29 manuscripts, collectively containing 471 texts and just over 1.25 million words of English. While texts of approximately a fifth of these works are already available in the main resource for the study of earlier English, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, this proportion obscures the unevenness of the coverage, with many manuscripts only sketchily represented or not represented at all. This project will produce transcriptions of selected texts from these unrepresented manuscripts and aggregate them into a digital corpus, available under a Creative Commons license to scholars and students across the world.
Funding Agency
Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences
Programme
Benefaction Fund

Mark Faulkner, Corpus philology: Using the Dictionary of Old English to get bigger data for Old English spelling variation, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38, (4), 2023, p1508 - 1521, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Mark Faulkner, A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, Book, PUBLISHED  DOI
Corpus Philology, Big Dating and Bottom-Up Periodisation in, editor(s)Stephen Pink Anthony Lappin , Dark Archives: Voyages into the Medieval Unread and Unreadable, 2019-2021, Oxford, 2022, pp280 - 308, [Mark Faulkner], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Using Manuscript Books as a Source for Medieval Culture, Oxford, 2021, Notes: [Adam Matthew: Research Methods: Primary Sources], Case Study, PUBLISHED  DOI
Mark Faulkner, The Old English Bede: a new source for the F-version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Medium Aevum, 90, (2), 2021, p217 - 229, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Habemus Corpora: Reapproaching Philological Problems in the Age of 'Big' Data, Anglia: Journal of English Philology, 139, 2021, p94 - 127, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
English in, editor(s)Anthony Grant , The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp374 - 387, [Mark Faulkner and Joan Beal], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Quantifying the Consistency of 'Standard' Old English Spelling, Transactions of the Philological Society, 118, (1), 2020, p192 - 205, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Mark Faulkner, Review of Language and Chronology: Text Dating by Machine Learning, by Gregory Toner and Xiwu Han , Linguist List, 2020, Review, SUBMITTED
Mark Faulkner, 'Medieval Manuscripts', Oxford Bibliographies Online, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, -, Bibliography, filmography, etc., PUBLISHED  DOI
  

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Mark Faulkner, When Philology Meets Big Data: Thoughts on Argumentation in Studies of Early English, Once and Future English, London, March, 2022, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, 'Babbling in the Vernacular': The English Language in the Middle Ages, 2022, -, Notes: [https://www.tcd.ie/library/manuscripts/blog/2022/01/babbling-in-the-vernacular/], Miscellaneous, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, An Even Heardra Nut to Crack: using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus to get big data for Old English spelling variation, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2022, Oral Presentation, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, What do we mean by "the continuity of English literature"? Insights From the Borderlands of "Old" and "Middle" English, ICOME: 12th International Conference on Middle English, Glasgow, 2022, Oral Presentation, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Corpus Philology: Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus to Get Big Data for Old English Spelling Variation, SELIM 32: Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature, University of La Rioja, Logrono, Spain, 14-16 September 2022, 2022, Oral Presentation, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner and Elisabetta Magnanti, Using Machine Learning to Generate Big Data for Book History, Manscript, Book and Print Cultures Seminar Series, Trinity College Dublin, 6 December 2022, 2022, Oral Presentation, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Corpus Philology: Towards Automatic Linguistic Profiling of Old English Texts, Keynote at 43rd Symposium on Old English, Middle English and Historical Linguistics in the Low Countries, Leiden, December, 2021, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Adventures in Translation: Creative Translation in the Undergraduate Curriculum at TCD, TOEBI Newsletter, 38, 2021, p8 - 18, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, A Tough Hnutu to Crack: Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus to Get Big Data for Major 'Transitional' English Sound Changes, From Old English to Middle English, Online, August, 2020, Oral Presentation, PUBLISHED
Mark Faulkner, Corpus Philology, Big Dating and Bottom-Up Periodisation', Dark Archives, Oxford, September, 2019, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED

  


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