Lab

The Blackfoot Lab began in Summer 2020. Scroll down to learn more about our projects and lab members.

Projects

Blackfoot Words

Our main project has been the creation of Blackfoot Words, a database of Blackfoot lexical forms across 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 2020 outcomes

  • digitized lexical forms from eight Blackfoot dictionaries and grammars

Summer 2021 outcomes

  • digitized lexical forms from 26 resources (in aggregate)
  • published Blackfoot Words v.1, which included lexical forms, maximal stems, and lemmas from nine of those resources
  • drafted and submitted a paper describing the database structure

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 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

Screenshot from Zoom of all AY 2020-2021 lab members
AY 2020-2021 lab members (click to enlarge)

Current (Summer 2021)

  • Tyler Brown YC ’23 (digitizing)
  • Josh Celli YC ’21 (digitizing, recordings)
  • Hailey Dykstra YC ’23 (digitizing)
  • Rodrigo Hernandez-Merlin YC ’22 (digitizing)
  • Evan Hochstein YC ’23 (digitizing, recordings, writing)
  • Pearl Hwang YC ’23 (digitizing, database)
  • Nico Kidd YC ’22 (digitizing, recordings)
  • Diana Kulmizev YC ’23 (digitizing, database)
  • Hannah Morrison YC ’23 (digitizing, recordings)
  • Matty Norris YC ’22 (digitizing, recordings)
  • Lena Venkatraman YC ’22 (digitizing, recordings, writing)
  • Alex Smith, ULeth (recordings)

Previous

Screenshot from Zoom of all Summer 2020 lab members
Summer 2020 lab members (click to enlarge)
  • Isobel Anthony YC ’20, (2020; wordlists, games)
  • Charelle Brown YC ’20 (2020; wordlists, recordings)
  • Paige Johnson YC ’20 (2020; wordlists, games)
  • Shayley Martin YC ’22 (2020; wordlists, games)
  • Hema Patel YC ’23, (2020; wordlists, games)
  • Evan Roberts YC ’23 (2020-2021; wordlists)

(Last updated: 21 August 2021)