Posted:
Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 04:00 PM
On Tues. Apr. 18, 2023, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Dr. Katherine Christoffersen (UTRGV, Project Director/Principal Investigator (PI)), Dr. Ana Carvalho (University of Arizona, co-PI), and Dr. Ryan Bessett (University of California San Diego, co-PI) a Humanities Collections and References Resource (HCRR) Implementation grant for their project entitled “Bilingual Voices in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands: Preserving, Expanding, and...
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Posted:
Friday, April 22, 2022, 12:00 AM
On April 22, 2022, Ms. Carolina DeAnda was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award for her poster entitled 'Celebrating Language Variation in RGV Classrooms' at the Engaged Scholar Symposium on Thurs. Apr. 21.
This poster builds on our March AAAL 2022 presentation.
This poster describes the process of planning, designing, and creating online teaching modules based on the CoBiVa. Each teaching module includes background information on the topic, links to resources, an explanation of...
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Posted:
Monday, March 21, 2022, 05:00 PM
At our first in-person conference in years, CoBiVa traveled to the 2022 meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in Pittsburgh, PA. Dr. Christoffersen and undergarduate student Ms. Carolina DeAnda presented "Citizen Sociolinguistics at the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Community-Based, Community-Driven Sociolinguistic Corpus with Resources for the Public" on a panel on citizen sociolinguistics.
The CoBiVa is a part of citizen...
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Posted:
Friday, December 3, 2021, 12:00 PM
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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Posted:
Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 12:00 PM
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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Posted:
Friday, October 1, 2021, 09:00 AM
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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Posted:
Friday, September 10, 2021, 02:00 PM
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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Posted:
Sunday, August 1, 2021, 05:00 PM
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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Posted:
Thursday, July 1, 2021, 05:00 PM
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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Posted:
Tuesday, June 1, 2021, 05:00 PM
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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Posted:
Saturday, May 1, 2021, 05:00 PM
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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Posted:
Thursday, April 1, 2021, 05:00 PM
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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Posted:
Monday, March 15, 2021, 03:00 PM
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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Posted:
Sunday, October 25, 2020, 05:00 PM
This year’s Engaged Scholar Symposium at UTRGV was hosted virtually October 21-23, 2020.
Our Engaged Scholar & Artist Award awardees Ms. Madeline (Maddie) Hernández and Mr. José (Freddy) Jiménez were live presenters on Fri. Oct 23rd.
Their presentation entitled “Creating Digital Resources About Languages in the RGV and Studying Their Impact” was their second academic presentation about their project. '
In their...
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Posted:
Saturday, October 10, 2020, 03:00 PM
As a part of the Engaged Scholar & Artist Award entitled "Digital Resources for the Public: Virtual Community Engagement and its Impact," Ms. Madeline Hernández created two different Adobe Spark pages about the CoBiVa. The Spark pages are explain the project to community members and those outside of the field of sociolinguistics.
An Adobe Spark is a presentation platform that can be viewed by scrolling down the page. This platform was chosen as it was...
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Posted:
Monday, September 28, 2020, 04:00 PM
During this year's LASSO 2020 Virtual Conference, three different groups of students and researchers from UTRGV connected to the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) presented.
First, our Engaged Scholar & Artist Award awardees Ms. Madeline Hernández and Mr. José Jiménez did a phenomenal job presenting at their first ever academic conference. Their presentation entitled "Digital Resources for the Public: Virtual Community Engagement and its...
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Posted:
Friday, September 25, 2020, 04:00 PM
After the testing transcription methods trials in the Fall, the research team performed a preliminary analysis of the findings, in particular the speed and ease of use for each of the transcription methods: ExpressScribe, SpeechNotes, and Stream.
Speed
We tabulated the overall average speed of each transcription method over the course of the four interview audios by each research assistant (RA). Certain RAs (such as student E) took more time than others who were quicker across the board (such...
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Posted:
Tuesday, September 1, 2020, 04:00 PM
Congratulations to Ms. Madeline Hernández and Mr. José Jiménez who have been awarded the prestigious Engaged Scholar & Artists Award by UTRGV for their project Digital Resources for the Public: Virtual Community Engagement and its Impact. They will be working on this project during 2020-2021, and it's a great fit for our current situation.
The purpose of this research is bifold: 1) to create digital materials/resources based on the research of...
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Posted:
Friday, August 21, 2020, 04:00 PM
During July, the PI and co-PIs on the project, funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, met often to determine the design and organization of the trials for the transcription methods.
The PI and co-PIs met worked with six (6) research assistants (RAs). The three (3) students from the University of Arizona (UA) were all PhD students, while the three (3) students from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) included: two students who completed their BA and were starting...
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Posted:
Tuesday, August 4, 2020, 05:30 PM
This summer, we are so thankful for our amazing CoBiVa team, funded in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities. Our 4 wonderful research assistants from Spring 2020 stayed on with us, and we added 4 new research assistants to the team!
Learn a little about our wonderful new RAs below:
Madeline (Maddie) Hernandez is an undergraduate English major with a concentration in Linguistics. She is currently in her last year and plans to graduate Spring 2021 and continue to a...
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Posted:
Friday, July 10, 2020, 04:00 PM
In this blog post, we further review the features of Stream, SpeechNotes and ExpressScribe, which we chose for further testing. (Refer to previous blog post for details on the other 27 options and our process for this decision.)
We chose three different technologically-aided transcription methods: Stream, SpeechNotes, and ExpressScribe. We further explain these below.
Stream
Stream is part of the Microsoft Suite, and many universities have access to this software. To use Stream, you first...
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Posted:
Friday, June 26, 2020, 04:00 PM
As a first step in our research project on technologically-aided transcription methods, the research team reviewed 27 different technologically aided transcription methods.
Due to our purposes and those of the NEH grant, we needed to fulfill two major criteria:
It needed to work with both Spanish and English
It needed be sustainable, meaning it was open-source or free to us at our institutions.
Of the 27 transcription methods reviewed, 21 had the ability to work with both Spanish...
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Posted:
Monday, June 8, 2020, 10:00 AM
On Sunday June 6, the CoBiVa was featured in the Brownsville Herald! We're very thankful to Ms. Erin Sheridan and The Brownsville Herald for the article, which made the front page.
We're very excited about the opportunity to share with the community about the beauty and value of code-switching and bilingualism!
The news article covered the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded to Dr. Katherine Christoffersen...
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Posted:
Sunday, May 20, 2012, 05:00 PM
On Tues. Apr. 7, 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Dr. Katherine Christoffersen (UTRGV, Project Director/Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Ana Carvalho (University of Arizona, co-PI), and Dr. Ryan Bessett (UTRGV, co-PI) a Humanities Collections and References Resource grant for their project entitled “Bilingual Voices in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands” in the amount of $59,975. This multi-site project will document language in the Rio Grande...
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