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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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)...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post

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...

Read the full post