The second event in the Digital Humanities Initiative Spring Seminars is a Presentation and Discussion with Luiz Amaral and Patricia Gubitosi,
Professors of Hispanic Linguistics at UMass entitled:
"The New England Corpus of Heritage and Second Language Speakers"
Monday, April 11, 3:30 - 4:30pm
in the UMass Digital Humanities Lab (at the back of the Translation
Center in the basement of Herter Hall).
Refreshments will be provided!
A description from the notice follows.
Corpora have become an intrinsic component of research in language. In the area of second and heritage language acquisition the development of new corpora has allowed researchers to document the language spoken by different multi-lingual communities throughout the world, and to study the linguistic development of individuals that speak more than one language. Although New England is the home of a large population of Spanish and Portuguese heritage and L2 speakers, there is currently very little data available about their linguistic diversity, and there is not a single corpus that documents the language varieties spoken in this region.
Amaral and Gubitosi's project will address this need by developing an online corpus of oral and written production of heritage and L2 speakers of Spanish and Portuguese in New England. The development of this corpus will help to document the linguistic pluralism of New England, and allow future generations to study language change by heritage populations in this region. It will also contribute to the growing number of projects worldwide that are gathering and classifying L2 language production.
Amaral and Gubitosi's talk will use their project as a springboard to a broader discussion about the practical and theoretical issues around using digital databases and corpora in humanities scholarship.
