James Tauber is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg where he is researching computational narratology and linguistic variation with a particular focus on the works of Tolkien. He is also the founder of the Digital Tolkien Project which won a Tolkien Society Award in 2025. For over thirty years, he has used computers to better understand historical languages and texts, especially Ancient Greek, and his work in digital classical philology, including as the lead developer at the Perseus Digital Library,  inspired his creation of a project to apply the same methods to the study of Tolkien. He has taught on the History of Middle-earth and Tolkien’s invented languages. James has a BSc in Linguistics, a PGDip in Classical Greek, a GradDip in Germanic Philology, and an MA (with Distinction) in Corpus Linguistics.

Tolkien-related Talks and Publications:

(forthcoming) ‘Digital Humanities’ in Oxford Handbook of J.R.R. Tolkien. Oxford University Press.

(2026) ‘Continuing Christopher Tolkien’s Work in a Digital Age’, Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 24: Iss. 2, Article 13.

(2025) ‘State of the Digital Tolkien Project’, Westmoot.

(2024) ‘LOD of the Rings: Tolkien’s Sub-Creation as Linked Open Data’, Linked Open Data and Literary Studies, Berlin.

(2023) ‘Tolkien’s Use of Invented Languages in Lord of the Rings’ in Reading Fictional Languages. Edinburgh University Press.

(2023) ‘Linguistic Variation in Tolkien’s Writing Styles’, Oxonmoot.

(2023) ‘Untangling the Second Age Tale of Years’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds.

(2023) ‘Visualizing the Structure of HoMe’, Mythmoot X.

(2022) ‘Computing the Interlace Structure of Lord of the Rings’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds.

(2022) ‘Remaking Text: Text Reuse in Tolkien’, Mythmoot IX.

(2021) ‘The Vocabulary of the Latin Translation of the Hobbit’, Tolkien Society Fall Seminar.

(2019) ‘Tolkien and Digital Philology’. Tolkien 2019, Birmingham.