As of 2023, I am doing my PhD at the University of Washington, and will be woking on sociolinguistic documentation of the Panãra language. It's still 2023 as of this being written so it's a bit early to report on anything! Stay tuned, though!
I am working on a software suite that enables smoother transfer of language materials from ELAN to FLEx, and back out to ELAN. This was started by a need from child language acquisition work in documentation contexts that would enable maintenance of metadata and data between the transfers. There is still a dependence on FLEx for its morphological parsing power, but quite a bit gets lost in import/export, including important information necessary to keep at all stages. This software, which we're calling flibl, creates an interchange format between the very different XML structures of FLExTexts and EAFs (the respective file formats of FLEx and ELAN texts) in JSON, allowing for more flexibility in the data's usability.
A major part of language work for me is making sure language is not separated from its users. This includes including sociolinguistic methods in analysis, but also archiving and outreach. At the Yale HistLing lab, I am working on refactoring the Chirila archive/database to be friendly and available to language community members who would like access to materials, and creating interfaces to see things like wordlists and maps more easily. Along these lines, we also have ongoing conversations and research about the nature of archiving and data sovereignty, including the disparate natures of various language materials and communities.
My driving research interest is the documentation of minoritized languages. I started on this track when I began undergrad at The University of Texas at Austin, working with Pattie Epps on Naduhup languages. It was also in that lab where I began working with technology to make reclamation-related processes more effective (where "reclamation" includes documentation, pedagogy, description, material creation, and other such sets of tasks).
Another thing I got involved with early on while at UT was the Bilingual Annotation Tasks Force (BATs), working under Jacqueline Toribio and Barbara Bullock. The lab was focussed on computational accounts of code-switching, but, being led by sociolinguists, we were very keen to keep an eye to language users as the key component for any kind of analysis. This was a major point of exposure to interdisciplinarity between sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and computation for me, all of which have continued to be attractive topics to me.
One of the most influential projects I have been on was one I got involved in while studying abroad in Canberra, through the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, working with Danielle Barth, James Grama, Simón González, and Catherine Travis. It was a project driven by Barth as a sociolinguist and documentary linguist. We expanded work on Matukar Panau, applying a sociophonetic analysis to audio materials and their transcriptions from fieldwork. I worked with the Montreal Forced Aligner to train a language model from the Matukar material itself, and we designed a recursive model creation pipeline to align the transcriptions maximally precisely to take vowel measurements. We took a generally variationist approach to the quantitative part of the project, to find likely places of social stratification.
I love to edit Wikipedia and other sister Wikimedia Projects, and I run Edit-a-Thons every so often to encourage this of others as well. You can find resources about getting into Wikipedia editing on the Resources page.
Other things~