Rachel McCarthy is a PhD researcher at University College Cork, Ireland, where she previously earned a First Class Honours in her undergraduate degree in "Digital Humanities and Information Technology". Her Bachelor's thesis used stylometry, collocation analysis, and relative frequencies to explore how the popularity of 19th-century literature was impacted by the gender of the author.
She then completed a "Digital Text Analysis" Master’s degree at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where she achieved a Distinction overall as well as a HOCI (highest possible grade) on her Master's thesis, recognizing her outstanding performance in investigating the stylistic identifiers of authorial gender by examining the novels of men, women, and women who published under male pen names over 300 years.
She is currently a PhD researcher at UCC as part of CASCADE, a Horizon Europe MSCA and UKRO Doctoral Network. The PhD project, titled "Measuring Change in Irish Literature", uses techniques from cultural analytics and natural language processing to pursue questions about the centrality of subject matters to Ireland’s literary canon, authorial language and individual style through time. Passionate about advancing text analysis, Rachel aims to uncover new insights into literary and historical texts using digital methodologies.