SPRAP

PhiloBiblon: A Database on Medieval Iberian Literature

Sponsor: Dr. Óscar Perea-Rodríguez

PhiloBiblon is a database for the study of the Romance literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia (Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Galician). It currently contains over 420,000 records thanks to forty years of work by dedicated volunteers in the U.S., Spain, and Portugal. It has become an indispensable resource for Hispanists because of its comprehensive coverage of primary sources, both manuscript and printed, the texts they contain, the individuals and institutions involved with the production and transmission of those sources and texts, the libraries holding them, relevant secondary references, and authority files for persons, places, and institutions.

We are currently involved in the process of migrating all data from a siloed database system to a Linked Open Data via FactGrid. Therefore, we are offering to UC Berkeley students the possibility of joining us towards the completion of this task via a) cleaning registers on spreadsheets; b) incorporating new data entry in our database; c) spreading the progress of the project through social networks and our Youtube channel. All tasks would be completely remote, so that you would be able to manage your schedule at your convenience, provided that you fulfill the agreed amount of 4 units (4 hours per week). If you have experience as Community Manager in social networks, please emphasize this in your application. We all are looking forward to welcome you in the pioneer Digital Humanities venture applied to Medieval Iberian studies, a project established at UC Berkeley during the last four decades!

Spanish-English Bilingualis in (the) California (Bay Area)

Sponsor: Dr. Justin Davidson

Thanks to a University of California Multicampus Research Grant, UC-Berkeley is partnering with UCLA and UC Santa Cruz to document, linguistically analyze, and ultimately legitimize Spanish-English bilingualism in California. Despite having more Spanish speakers than any other Spanish-speaking country in the world (save Mexico), the United States is often considered a largely monolingual English-speaking country. The long history of (Standard) English hegemony in the United States has resulted in, among many other things, a general lack of empirical research on US Spanish and its speakers. Accordingly, during the Spring of 2024, we (at Cal) will conduct a total of 100 sociolinguistic interviews with a diverse population of Spanish-English bilinguals in California (half with Spanish as their first language, half with English as their first language). Speech data, collected in both Spanish and English, will be used to populate a freely accessible online corpus of California Spanish-English speech that will position the University of California as a lasting leader in bilingualism research. Specifically, students that assist in this project will be required to complete the following tasks, and will notably be compensated $25 (via Amazon gift cards) for every successful interview they perform:

1. Attend a training workshop to learn how to use recording equipment and conduct a sociolinguistic interview in both English and Spanish
2. Borrow the recording equipment and perform sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals that reside anywhere in California
3. Responsibly manage the delivery of $25 Amazon gift cards to study participants as compensation (i.e., every person that is interviewed is to receive a gift card as compensation for their participation, and separately for every successful interview performed, you earn your own $25 Amazon gift card, ideally up to 10 interviews per SPRAP student)
4. Upload the speech files to an online server

Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California (MuHSiC) Corpus

Sponsor: Dr. Justin Davidson

Thanks to a University of California Multicampus Research Grant, UC-Berkeley is partnering with UCLA and UC Santa Cruz to document, linguistically analyze, and ultimately legitimize Spanish-English bilingualism in California. Despite having more Spanish speakers than any other Spanish-speaking country in the world (save Mexico), the United States is often considered a largely monolingual English-speaking country. The long history of (Standard) English hegemony in the United States has resulted in, among many other things, a general lack of empirical research on US Spanish and its speakers.

Having already collected a total of 188 interviews in prior semesters and gathered machine-automated transcriptions of their content, in this Fall 2024 semester we now begin the corpus assembly phase. In particular, students are needed to listen to recorded interviews and manually correct any errors in the automated transcripts. Once the transcripts are all corrected, only then can we proceed to phonetic and other linguistic analyses of the corpus.

Students working on this project will be expected to:

1. Attend a training workshop to learn how to correct interview transcriptions
2. Correct a given set of transcriptions over the semester
3. Upload corrected transcriptions to a public server

Venezuelans in California

Sponsor: Nikolai Schwarz

The goal is to analyze the phonetics of Venezuelan Spanish. As it stands, the phonetic empirical literature has little to no work on Venezuelan Spanish. As a result, there is no groundwork for analyzing the acoustics of Venezuelan Speech. This project is collecting speech data through word list readings and sociolinguistic interviews. The word list is specifically targeting the production of liquids, nasals, and fricatives in Venezuelan Spanish. The current phonetic literature reports impressionistically different variations of these three sound classes. Liquids are reported impressionistically as being neutralized in coda position in many varieties of Venezuelan Spanish, however no acoustic analysis has been reported in the literature. The trend is similar for nasals and fricatives as there has been no acoustic phonetic evidence presented supporting these claims.

Phonetics of Cantonese-English Bilinguals

Sponsor: Nikolai Schwarz

Recent work into bilingual research has found a variety of phonetic effects around the site of a code-switch. In this context, I will be using code-switch to describe the phenomenon of a bi-/multilingual switching between two languages within an utterance. Previous studies have found convergence in phonetic/phonological features when approaching a code-switch and after the code-switch. For example, Spanish-English bilinguals may exhibit convergences in Voice Onset Time (VOT) around a code-switch. In Spanish, /p t k/ will have short lag stop bursts (lower VOT) while in English, /p t k/ will have long lag stop bursts (higher VOT). While approaching a code-switch from English to Spanish, the /p t k/ stops in English would have lower VOT than in their monolingual utterances, converging towards a more "Spanish-like" pronunciation of these stops. In this project, we analyze the phonetics of code-switching of Cantonese-English bilinguals in the SpiCE corpus. We analyze the vowel qualities, speech rate, and tonal qualities of these bilinguals in code-switched utterances compared to monolingual utterances. Students on this project will be asked to annotate prosodic utterances in Praat.

De Madrid al Cielo: UC Berkeley Madrid Program 2025

Sponsor: Dr. Donna Southard

UC Berkeley Summer Program for Study abroad offer the possibility of sharpening your Spanish language skills and settle into the Spanish pace of life in Madrid, the stunning cosmopolitan capital of Spain. The program encourages students to a complete immersion in day-to-day ‘madrileña’ life, ‘de Madrid al Cielo’, while earning UC Berkeley credit. Students can satisfy language requirements, including credit toward minors or majors, or just make progress toward a personal goals of speaking fluent Spanish and learning about Spanish culture. We are offering UC Berkeley students the possibility of joining the Program Director to promote the Summer Spanish Program through social networks, such as Instagram, BlueStacks, BlueSky, Mastodon, and Twitter (nobody calls it X; sorry, Elon). All tasks will be completely remote, so that you will be able to manage your time as you wish, provided that you fulfill the agreed amount. If you have experience as a Community Manager in social networks, please emphasize this in your application. We look forward to working with you in this exciting project and encourage you to express all your creativity in social networks!

The Archive of Latine Feelings

Sponsor: Dr. Raúl Coronado

How can we write a history of Latine feelings? How can we understand how Mexicans who lived in the nineteenth-century Southwest felt, how did they understand their interiority, when did they feel joy, pain, serenity?

Knowing more about this can teach us if there are any patterns in how Latines wrote about themselves and their community. We can also provide more evidence for the general sense that Latine culture is more family and community oriented versus being more individualized.

Prof. Coronado is studying the history of private writing among the nineteenth-century Mexican communities of California, New Mexico, and Texas. By exploring their private writing—correspondence between loved ones, notebooks, diaries, etc.—we can get a glimpse into the history of Latine feelings.

Professor Coronado has spent many years collecting archival materials—private Latine writing from the 1800s held by various archival repositories. He’s scanned these documents and turned them into PDFs. Now, with the help of URAP apprentices, we are ready to turn these PDFs into OCRable scans. Our project will convert handwritten letters, most of which are in cursive writing from the 1800s, into a document that is searchable. By scanning them, we can then use AI to do large scale searches for words that will allow us to answer our questions. This is a game changer.

We will be working with the Digital Humanities Lab. The project will begin by making the PDFs ready to be OCRed. You will receive training from the D-Lab so that you can prepare the PDFs to be OCRed. Then, the D-Lab will OCR the documents, and will use AI to transcribe these handwritten hard-to-read manuscripts.

We will then read selectively by focusing on letters that Prof. Coronado had already identified as important. Together, we will learn paleography: the ability to read old cursive handwriting from the 1800s. With time, you’ll become an expert in deciphering nineteenth-century handwriting. We will look at the transcription created by AI and check for accuracy. Eventually, we will create a database that tracks the language of feelings.