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 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 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

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 2020 outcomes

annotated English phrases from eight elicitation sessions

Summer 2021 outcomes

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