Blackfoot Lab

Projects

Blackfoot Words

Our main project has been the creation of Blackfoot Words, a database of Blackfoot lexical forms from legacy documentation materials. Project tasks included: (1) digitizing the lexical forms and related metadata from grammars, dictionaries, and wordlists; (2) a morphemic analysis of those words into stems and morphemes; and (3) importing the data into a MySQL relational database.

Summer 2022 outcomes

  • published Blackfoot Words v1.1, which breaks down many of the stems in the database into morphemes

Summer 2021 outcomes

  • digitized lexical forms from 26 resources (in aggregate)
  • published Blackfoot Words v1, which included lexical forms, maximal stems, and lemmas from nine of those resources
  • drafted and submitted a paper describing the database structure
  • (October 2021: presented the paper at the Algonquian Conference)

Summer 2020 outcomes

  • digitized lexical forms from eight Blackfoot dictionaries and grammars

Annotating audio recordings

Some students are helping me to organize audio recordings I have made with Blackfoot speakers. This involves segmenting and annotating Blackfoot and English speech in ELAN.

Summer 2021 outcomes

  • annotated English phrases from 27 elicitation sessions (in aggregate)
  • added Blackfoot annotations to several elicitation sessions

Summer 2020 outcomes

  • annotated English phrases from eight elicitation sessions

Language teaching games

During Summer 2020, we focused on creating language teaching games in conjunction with the Cuts Wood School in Browning, MT, the Piegan Institute, and Native Teaching Aids. By the end of Summer 2020 we had developed four pedagogical games.

Lab members

Lab members in Summer 2021
In person at last! Pictured are most of the Summer 2021 lab members. Not pictured: Tyler Brown, McKenzie Denham, and Josh Celli.

Current (Fall 2022)

  • Dani Katenkamp, Yale graduate student (2022-present)
  • Jem Burch, YC ’25 (2022-present)
  • Priscilla Ehrgood YC ’24 (2022-present)
  • Mara Gutierrez YC ’25 (2022-present)
  • Alara O’Bryan YC ’25 (2022-present)
  • Isaiah Suchman YC ’23 (2022-present)
  • Taylor Triplett YC ’23 (2022-present)
  • Diana Kulmizev YC ’23 (2021-present)
  • Hailey Dykstra YC ’23 (2020-present)
Summer 2021 pizza party
The Summer 2021 lab members, enjoying some New Haven pizza before we got rained out! (click to enlarge)

Previous

Screenshot from Zoom of all AY 2020-2021 lab members
AY 2020-2021 lab members (click to enlarge)
Screenshot from Zoom of all Summer 2020 lab members
Summer 2020 lab members (click to enlarge)
  • Isobel Anthony YC ’20, (2020)
  • Charelle Brown YC ’20 (2020)
  • Tyler Brown YC ’23 (2020-2021)
  • Josh Celli YC ’21 (2020-2021)
  • Madeline Gupta YC ’25 (2022)
  • Rodrigo Hernandez-Merlin YC ’22 (2020-2021)
  • Evan Hochstein YC ’23 (2021-2022)
  • Pearl Hwang YC ’23 (2021)
  • Paige Johnson YC ’20 (2020)
  • Nico Kidd YC ’22 (2020-2022)
  • Lydia Lee YC ’23 (2022)
  • Shayley Martin YC ’22 (2020)
  • Hannah Morrison YC ’23 (2020-2021)
  • Matty Norris YC ’22 (2021-2022)
  • Hema Patel YC ’23, (2020)
  • Evan Roberts YC ’23 (2020-2021)
  • Alex Smith, ULeth (2021)
  • Lena Venkatraman YC ’22 (2021)

(Last updated: 25 Jan 2023)