Research & Projects

Tasks and Skills

As a principal investigator, I have been very involved in every stage of this project. Throughout my time working on this I have had to read and summarize various papers related to what we are investigating (especially regarding light verb constructions as opposed to serial verb constructions). The goal of the project is to have speakers of Louisiana Creole perform acceptability evaluations on various sentences, so I have also helped with the compilation of these sentences and creation of the tasks that we will be asking speakers to complete. Additionally, I have created an interview schedule based on the needs of speakers, who are usually much older. I have formed relationships with various community members and organizations in order to learn more about the needs of the community and how to properly and respectfully conduct research within it.

Tasks and Skills

Having been involved with this project for a while now, I have had the opportunity to work on many aspects of the post-data collection side of research. I started off using Audacity to examine audio files, then logging timecodes and applying metadata to them through a shared master document on Excel. Eventually I became more involved in the database management by organizing the document, converting file types, and sorting data. There is a team of graduate and undergraduate research assistants and as the lead research assistant, I have created many training materials, including videos and manuals, for new team members to introduce them to the project and demonstrate how to use the various applications.

Tasks and Skills

I initially started assisting with the Jewish Languages Project as part of a project that sought to create an interactive map displaying the variety of Jewish languages worldwide throughout the centuries. I was assigned different countries and used public archives to find documents from these countries in various languages that Jews spoke. After this project was completed, I was contacted to consult for a new project, Heirloom: Recovering Our Jewish Family Languages. This is a mentor-apprentice style initiative which pairs learners with speakers of endangered Jewish languages. I provided ideas for the format of the program, the recruitment, and gave advice based on prior experience working with speakers of endangered languages. Many of my ideas and tips were implemented and the program piloted in July 2024.

Tasks and Skills

Brought onto the project under funding from the ICRU DEI Teams Award Initiative, I was able to participate in the design phase of the study. Initially, I gathered photos that were ranked by participants using Likert scales along categories such as French-not French. Three photos were settled on, which were used as the "teachers" the later participants were assigned. I assisted with other tasks, but one of my main accomplishments during my time working on this project was advocating for the addition of a map task to test students' base knowledge of the variety of French dialects. I took ownership over this aspect of the study, gathering recordings of the same sentence from various French speakers and figuring out how to phrase and implement the task on the application we were using.