News Archive

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 Elaborating Sociolinguistic Collections” in the amount of $349,975.

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.

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. 

In December, 2021, Dr. Katherine Christoffersen together with M.A. student Ms.Kimberly Regalado published an article entitled "Toda lengua es válida aquí en esta clase: Translanguaging pedagogy and critical language awareness in sociolinguistics classes on the U.S.-Mexico border" in the Journal of Bilingual Education Research and Instruction.

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 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.

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.

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!

Congratulations to Kimberly Regalado, a Sustainability Fellowship recipient for her thesis project entitled "Sustaining la Voz del Valle" (Sustaining the Voice of the Valley)!

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. 

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 CoBiVa website.

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.

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."

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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!

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.

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:

1. It needed to work with both Spanish and English
2. It needed be sustainable, meaning it was open-source or free to us at our institutions.

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.

Join us in welcoming our wonderful research assistants who have been working hard to make progress on the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa). Read below to learn a bit more about our Spring 2020 CoBiVa Team.

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.