Reanimating African American oral histories of the Gulf South
2024- | w/ Isabela Pizarro, Jessica Heady & Dr. Sarah Moeller
Abstract
This project, a collaborative effort across departments (UF Department of Linguistics, UF Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, George A. Smathers Libraries), universities (University of Florida, Emmanuel University, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf), and organizations (National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies), seeks to digitize and make publically available, in a user-friendly and transparent modality, interviews with African Americans forming the Joel Buchanan African American Oral History Archive at the University of Florida. The output of this project thus far has been a website hosting time-aligned transcriptions for said interviews, language games to familiarize K-12 students with features of African American Language (AAL), a host of teaching resources for the development of curricula integrating African American oral histories, and an interactive map developed using named entity recognition (NER) which allows listeners to visualize geographic details within the interviews. My work is principally focused on annotating hundreds of interviews for features of AAL (e.g., perfect done, remote past BIN, person/number disagreement, and null copula) and cleaning transcriptions for time-alignment. My annotations also help train tagger models on how to identify AAL, a current deficit in extant taggers. Throughout my time working in the Machine Learning for Endangered Language Documentation Lab, I have also had the opportunity to think about how dialectal variation interacts with the interview mode. Likewise, this project raises a host of questions surrounding the efficacy and implementation of manual annotation, especially of dialect-specific forms which annotators may be unfamiliar with.
Funding
This project was supported by NEH PW-277433-21 and the American Council of Learned Societies.
External Links
Visit African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South Digital Archive, the website resulting from this work, which is under continual development as more interviews are added.