I was unable to attend this year, but my colleagues presented two papers I was a part of at the 84th Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL84) in Charleston, South Carolina.
The first presentation was with Bill Kretzschmar and Katie Kuiper and was called “Automated Large-Scale Phonetic Analysis: DASS” wherein we introduce the NSF-funded project—with Drs. Kretzschmar and Peggy Renwick as PIs—that I am involved in. A PDF of the slide show is are available here.
The second presentation was with Rachel Olsen, Mike Olsen, and Peggy Renwick and was called “Transcribing the Digital Archive of Southern Speech: Methods and Preliminary Analysis” wherein we talked about the nuts and bolts of how to get a project of this size running. A PDF of the slide show is available here.
This work is part of an ongoing project at the Linguistic Atlas Office at the University of Georgia. We have several hundred hours of recordings from the 1970s of speakers all across the South. We have around 40 undergraduate workers transcribing for us with another couple grad students (including myself) doing the less soul-sucking work. Eventually we’ll have all this data freely available online, but in the meantime we’re figuring out how to process such scratchy recordings and doing linguistic analysis on it. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m glad we were able to show others our work.