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), sought 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 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 was 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 helped 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 research patterns in AAL, such as when, where, and why one might observe a lack of noun/verb concord. Since many of these interviews are conducted with older African Americans, these interviews also offer insight into how AAL has changed over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Funding

This project was supported by NEH PW-277433-21.

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.