Ms. Carolina DeAnda was awarded an Engaged Scholar and Artist Award for Spring 2022 entitled "Celebrating Linguistic Variation in RGV Classrooms." Ms. DeAnda will be creating teaching materials based on the CoBiVa. These exercises and activities will be added to the CoBiVa website. We are very excited about her project, as it will help teachers to use the CoBiVa in classes, thereby increasing the awareness and appreciation for linguistic variation. Ms. DeAnda...

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As a part of the National Endowment of Humanities project "Bilingual Voices in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," Dr. Bessett, Dr. Carvalho and I wrote a white paper on our findings on technologically-aided transcription methods for bilingual sociolinguistic corpora. This white paper entitled "Technologically-Aided Transcription Methods for Sociolinguistic Corpora: Findings, Resources, and Considerations" details the project from beginning to end including links to resources...

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This year's LASSO 2021 Virtual Conference included two presentations related to the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) and presented by three faculty and five students. First, Dr. Katherine Christoffersen, Ms. Kimberly Regalado, and Ms. Carolina DeAnda presented "Learning sociolinguistics en dos idiomas: Translangaging pedagogy and critical language awareness in university level courses" on Friday, Sept. 24. This presentation analyzed how students responded to a...

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During Spring 2021, we tested out 2 different transcription methods (Microsoft Stream and ExpressScribe) with students in internship style corpus development classes at UTRGV and UA. We here report the findings of both the speed and ease of use of these methods, funded in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities. Based on preliminary findings on speed and ease of use during a pilot study with research assistants and evaluations of accuracy, SpeechNotes was no longer considered a...

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Congratulations to Ms. Aubrey Villanueva, UTRGV alum and former CoBiVa research assistant, who is starting her first semester at the University of Colorado Boulder MA Linguistics program! Ms. Aubrey Villanueva completed her BA in English with a concentration in Linguistics and minor in Legal Studies and graduated magna cum laude in 2020 from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Aubrey is a proud native of the Rio Grande Valley. During her time at UTRGV, she contributed to the...

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Congratulations to Kimberly Regalado, a Sustainability Fellowship recipient for her thesis project entitled "Sustaining la Voz del Valle" (Sustaining the Voice of the Valley)! Kimberly Regalado is a first generation college graduate from UTRGV with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in English as a Second Language. She is currently a student in the M.A. English Linguistics program at UTRGV. She worked as a research assistant during Spring and Summer 2021 with...

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We are so thankful for our amazing CoBiVa team that has been working with us on the continued elaboration of the corpus, funded in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities. We have been fortunate to continue to work with Ms. Elsa Magaña and Ms. Mayte Vega Mudy, and this summer, three new research assistants have joined the team.  Learn a little about our wonderful Summer 2021 RAs below:   Carolina De Anda is double majoring in...

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During our project, funded in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Dr. Ryan Bessett, Dr. Ana Carvalho, and myself (Dr. Katherine Christoffersen) tested several technologically-aided transcription methods. We eventually found that Stream auto-generated transcripts were preferable based on accuracy, speed, and ease of use. While Stream generated transcripts with timestamps, it did not create the precise WEBVTT format required for time-alignment and clickable transcripts on the...

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CoBiVa was represented at the 2021 virtual convening of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, which took place from Friday March 19 through Tuesday March 23. Maddie (Madeline) Hernandez presented her project entitled "Virtual community engagement & applied linguistics: The impact of creating digital resources for the public" at a live roundtable session. There was a lively and active discussion about this work, created collaboratively with Freddy (Jose)...

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Following our review of technologically-aided transcription methods and preliminary analysis of speed and ease of use, we analyzed the accuracy of two such those methods: auto-generated transcription (Microsoft Stream) and audio from speakers (SpeechNotes). This is part of the National Endowment of the Humanities grant-funded project "Bilingual Voices in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands: Technology-Enhanced Transcription and Community Engaged Scholarship." The...

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