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.

We have published a paper describing the structure of the Blackfoot Words database:

  • Weber, Natalie, Tyler Brown , Joshua Celli , McKenzie Denham , Hailey Dykstra, Nico Kidd, Rodrigo Hernandez-Merlin, Evan Hochstein, Pinyu Hwang, Diana Kulmizev, Hannah Morrison, Matty Norris, and Lena Venkatraman. 2023. Blackfoot Words: A lexical database of Blackfoot legacy sources. Language Resources and Evaluation 57: 1207–1262. Open access: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09631-2

Summer 2023 outcomes

  • paper officially published!

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)

  • Jem Burch, YC ’25 (2022-present)
  • Leander He YC ’26 (2023-present)
  • Corine Huang YC ’26 (2023-present)
  • Pearl Hwang YC ’23 (2021, 2023-present)
  • Alara O’Bryan YC ’25 (2022-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)
  • Hailey Dykstra YC ’23 (2020-2023)
  • Priscilla Ehrgood YC ’24 (2022-2023)
  • Madeline Gupta YC ’25 (2022)
  • Mara Gutierrez YC ’25 (2022-2023)
  • Rodrigo Hernandez-Merlin YC ’22 (2020-2021)
  • Evan Hochstein YC ’23 (2021-2022)
  • Paige Johnson YC ’20 (2020)
  • Nico Kidd YC ’22 (2020-2022)
  • Diana Kulmizev YC ’23 (2021-2023)
  • 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)
  • Isaiah Suchman YC ’23 (2022-2023)
  • Taylor Triplett YC ’23 (2022-2023)
  • Lena Venkatraman YC ’22 (2021)

(Last updated: 30 September 2023)