What’s in a Name? Exploring Personal Name (Mis)Representation Online
PhD project
PhD student:
Supervisors:
Alex Taylor (School of Informatics), Pip Thornton (School of Geosciences)
Outputs from this project
Forthcoming!
This installation explored the social and technological impacts of digital name misrepresentation. Many webforms won’t take accent marks – so-called ‘special characters’ like the Irish síneadh fada or the French circumflex. People often have to Anglicise their name to sign up online, stripping out the accents so that their name is “acceptable” to the system. This impacts their sense of identity; emotionally, culturally and in a very real sense. At the Edinburgh Science Festival in 2025, participants were invited to engage with this issue through a reversal of roles, where English-language names met the sort of culturally insensitive error warnings usually reserved for those with names in other languages – “Whoops! That’s not a name. Please try again.” Inhabiting this role allowed people who had never seen these warnings to feel the frustration of others, while the multiple-language keyboard gave the other participants the new experience of recognition for their given name.
Website: https://bridaineparnell.github.io/
Collaborators: Sam Healy and Brendan McCarthy, Ray Interactive
Funder: UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world NLP
Project dates: 2024 – 2025








