When Katherine Ireland discusses analytics with students in her teaching lab, she doesn’t start with algorithms or statistical models. She introduces analytics as a storytelling tool.

A former English major who transitioned into the world of linguistics and data science, Ireland joined the Terry College of Business in 2025 as the assistant director of the M. Douglas and V. Kay Ivester Institute for Business Analytics and Insights. Now, as the college’s director for the Terry Analytics Lab, she is proving that analytics tools are for people who work with words and numbers alike.

Since her arrival, she has guided students and faculty through the dense thickets of R programming, Python and text analytics as director of the Terry Analytics Lab. The institute’s mission is to integrate high-level data literacy into the curriculum of every Terry student.

Analytics of the written word

Ireland’s journey to the world of business analytics was not expected. She holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Georgia, with a background rooted in literature and corpus linguistics — the study of language through large, computerized databases of text. Her early papers focus on the structure of language and dialects in the American South.

Before being recruited by the Terry College, Ireland served as head of the UGA Libraries’ DigiLab, an interdisciplinary research hub where researchers from across campus found help building out the analytics portions of their research projects.

Her specialty, text analytics, involves extracting meaningful patterns from massive datasets of human language. These tools can achieve several tasks, such as deciphering social media sentiment or digging into complex legal documents.

“People often think data science is just about numbers and spreadsheets, but my favorite type of data is text,” Ireland said. “I’m a linguist by training, but the tools I use to analyze 19th-century novels are the same tools we use to analyze insurance policies or corporate earnings calls.”

This humanities-first approach makes her a powerful mentor for students who might find coding intimidating. Ireland frequently shares her own story of learning to code later in her academic career to encourage others.

“I tell my students, ‘Y’all, my background is in literature. If I can work in R and Python, you definitely can,” she said. “It’s about breaking down the barrier of the ‘math person’ versus the ‘humanities person.’ In business today, you have to be both.”

Ireland’s research exemplifies the practical application of text analytics in business. She is collaborating with risk management and insurance and legal studies faculty on a comprehensive 50-state study examining the readability of insurance contracts.

As state governments increasingly implement regulations requiring insurance policies to be written in “plain language,” Ireland plans on using language analytics to measure the readability of these contracts.  

“Some states have very specific regulations about contracts being more readable,” Ireland explained. “We are looking at how those variables influence the way these documents are actually produced. It’s a perfect example of how linguistic data informs corporate compliance and consumer protection.”

The Terry Analytics Lab

While her research pushes the boundaries of text analysis, Ireland’s primary focus is the Terry Analytics Lab. TAL has expanded as part of the Ivester Institute to support students and researchers across the college.

It’s powered by Ireland and a team of 23 undergraduate and graduate student consultants — selected from a record-breaking pool of applicants — who provide walk-in data support for their peers.

“Why have a physical lab when we all have laptops?” Ireland asked. “Because we learn better together. We can all gather around different screens and show what we’re working on, debug and analyze it together … We need to connect the dots of the full data pipeline and be able to share it with the people we work with.”

Analytics and coding literacy will only become more important as more businesspeople without a full coding background turn to AI to build analytics systems.

“AI is great,” she said. “You still need the human in the loop, and our students also need to be able to synthesize and interpret and tell a story about what’s actually going on in our data.”

Last fall and this spring, Ireland taught Terry’s first course on Text Analytics for Business. The combined MBA and MSBA course will focus on natural language processing and how to use textual data to gain an advantage in the market.