- Ongoing Project
- Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South A collaboration between Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP), UF Department of Linguistics, and George A. Smathers Libraries, Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South (otherwise known as RGS or the African American Oral History Project (AAOH)) is an NEH-funded collaborative project. The project’s foundation is the Joel Buchanan African American Oral History Archive, which is ongoing and currently contains over 1000 interviews with African Americans in the Gulf South, an underrepresented population in many other oral history collections. Contained within this archive are the stories of African Americans who lived through the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, the wars of the 20th Century, and the first Black presidency, along with the voices of those typically marginalized in the study of African American histories such as the Gullah-Geechee and Black Seminoles. This project emphasizes the aforementioned subjects and creates an environment for the extensive analysis of African American Language in the Gulf South (AALGS). The RGS project organizes these elements into a curriculum with enormous potential for educators and their students or in alternative educational environments such as teacher, adult, senior, or museum education programs. This collection of oral histories also allows for the linguistic analysis of AALGS and innovation regarding its inclusion within computational linguistics.
- Short-term and Pilot Projects. Many of these are waiting for personnel to launch or bring to conclusion. They are often appropriate for a term project or an independent study project. Let us know if you are interested!
- MELDing the gap. Field linguists are not computational linguists (generally). Machine learning models can be trained to automatically predict linguistic analyses for new languages. But this does not benefit the ordinary working linguist if it is not in a format they are used to. Model predictions need to be converted to formats that can be imported to interfaces popular among linguists (e.g. FLEx and ELAN)
- Hoarding Language? Clinicians in the UF Department of Psychiatry who diagnose people with hoarding disorder have reported they can predict whether someone will be diagnosed with this late onset mental disorder just by talking with them. Do they use language differently? If so, how? Can AI system diagnose hoarding through language before other symptoms have manifested?
- Language Documentation and Description.