u.washington.edu
I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Washington. My research focuses on language documentation, particularly the Niger-Congo languages of West Africa, and developing cyberinfrastructure for interoperability of linguistic data. My interests include fieldwork, software development, internationalization and UI design. Presently I am a Research Assistant on the NSF-funded project Implementing the GOLD Community of Practice: Laying the Foundations for a Linguistics Cyberinfrastructure.
I am involved in several endangered language documentation initiatives and projects. I am technical lead for the Languages of the Dogon project, an NSF/NEH funded initiative to document the Dogon languages of Mali. Under development is a large online-accessible comparative lexicon of these efforts (with an extensive flora and fauna guide with images, and videos and imagery that illustrate lexical entries in the lexicon). The project's website is: http://dogonlanguages.org. I plan to begin fieldwork on Torro-so [dts] this summer and as a post-doc in 2010. Previously, I did fieldwork on Western Sisaala [ssl] in Ghana.
Before coming to UW, I worked for five years with The Linguist List, where I was team leader and architect of the E-MELD School of Best Practices in Digital Language Documentation. It's a very useful tool if you're into Documentary Linguistics or digital archiving, and one of the funnest things I helped to create while with The Linguist List.
At the UW I have had the pleasure of working with the Catalyst Research team as an RA in user interaction design. Catalyst develops very cool open source web tools. I also spent two very interesting years as an RA at UW's Language Learning Center, where we developed computer assisted language learning web applications and specialized in the digitization and archiving of audio, video and textual resources.
My Ph.D. advisors are Professor Emily Bender and Professor Richard Wright. Bender is the Director of UW's Professional MA in Computational Linguistics program. And Wright is director of the UW Phonetics Laboratory.My CV is here in PDF. It needs to learn to update itself. My M.A. thesis "A Grammatical Sketch of Isaalo (Western Sisaala)", a previously undocumented language spoken in the Upper West Region of Ghana, was published and is available through Amazon. I did fieldwork on this language in Ghana for a three month period in 2003. Here, look at me 'in the field'. :)
I also work as a private consultant in digital archiving and as a web developer.You can contact me at: stivu.washington.edu
