LinguisticBits is a subsidiary of MusicalBits GmbH. LinguisticBits is run by Dr. Thomas Schmidt.

After twenty-two years of building corpus tools, heading research projects, running corpus platforms, archives and infrastructure units and supporting linguists in their work with corpora, I found that some tasks are best tackled by research projects within academic institutions, and some are better outsourced to professional service providers. LinguisticBits is a partner for the latter.

The mission of LinguisticBits is to effectively and efficiently support (people in) research projects and data centres in technical matters around corpora and corpus workflows.

Education

I studied General Linguistics, Mathematics, English, French, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Kaiserslautern, the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, the University of Edinburgh, the FU Berlin and the Université Paris VIII (not strictly in that order, for details see my LinkedIn profile). I have an M.A. in General Linguistics, a European Master's Degree of Linguistics and an intermediate diploma (≈ B.A.) in mathematics and computer science. I got a PhD degree (summa cum laude) in Germanic Linguistics from the University of Dortmund in 2004. The title of my doctoral thesis translates as "Computer-aided transcription: Modelling and visualising spoken language by text-technological means".

Experience

I worked for the University of Hamburg, the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, the University of Basel, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Philipps Speech Processing and the European Language Resource Distribution Agency (again, not in that order, for details see my LinkedIn profile). Before LinguisticBits, I have done freelance work for Texas Instruments and CASIO, for the Free University of Bozen, for the Universities of Ghent, Olomuc, Düsseldorf, Duisburg-Essen and Hamburg, and for the Institute for the German Language.

I spent a post-doc year at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA, and was a visting researcher at the Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara and at the University of Texas in Austin.

I have initiated and worked as managing director for the Hamburg Centre of Language Corpora (HZSK). I headed the Archive for Spoken German (AGD) at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language for ten years and represented it in the Committee for Data Access of the RatSWD.

Research profile

I was principal investigator in more than 10 research projects (see Projects section) and have published more than 100 research papers and books in the field of corpus linguistics and computational lexicography (see my ORCiD profile). I have acted as a reviewer for numerous workshops, conferences and journals and for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (Hcéres), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and SwissUniversities, and for the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. I am or was member of the scientific advisory boards of NITE, GeWiss, Camomile, KompAS, INEL, and Oral-History.Digital. Besides numerous smaller workshops, I have organised the GSCL Conference 2011 in Hamburg, and was one of the program chairs for the 58. Jahrestagung des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache.

Skills

I am an experienced Java developer (both desktop and server) and an expert in XML and surrounding technologies (XSLT, XPath etc.). I also do Python and C#, SQL and HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I am the lead developer of EXMARaLDA, the Kicktionary, and I have developed large parts of the Database for Spoken German and ZuMult.
I speak and write German, English and French.