u.washington.edu
I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Washington (UW). My research focuses include language documentation and description (in particular the Niger-Congo languages of West Africa, where I do fieldwork), digital archiving, and the development of cyberinfrastructure for the interoperability of linguistics data.
My Ph.D. advisors are Professors Emily Bender and Richard Wright. Prof. Bender is director of UW's Professional MA in Computational Linguistics program. And Prof. Wright is director of the UW Phonetics Laboratory.
In 2010 I am a teaching assistant for the Computational Linguistics program at the UW. In 2009, I was funded through UW's Royalty Research Fund to work on the Phoible project: http://phoible.org. The Phoible project is building an online and accessible typological phonological database to encompass the feature sets and sound systems from all known languages for which resources can be discovered. There are currently around 1100 distinct languages in the Phoible database.
I am involved in several endangered language documentation initiatives and projects. I am technical lead for the Languages of the Dogon project, an NSF (and formerly NEH) funded initiative to document the Dogon languages of Mali (PI Professor Jeffrey Heath). 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. From April-June 2009, I undertook fieldwork on Toro-so [dts] to expand our comparative lexicon and to create an English--French--Toro-so dictionary and a grammatical sketch of the language. I aim to continue fieldwork as a post-doc in 2010.
At the UW I have had the pleasure of working with Professors Scott Farrar and Fei Xia as a research assistant on the NSF-funded project Implementing the GOLD Community of Practice: Laying the Foundations for a Linguistics Cyberinfrastructure. I also worked with the Catalyst Research team as an RA in user interaction design. Catalyst develops very cool open source web tools for UW. Between 2005-2007, I worked as an RA at UW's Language Learning Center and developed computer assisted language learning web applications and specialized in the digitization and archiving of audio, video and textual resources.
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. The School is a very useful tool if you're undertaking language documentation and digital archiving of language data. It is the widest impacting project that I helped to create while working for The Linguist List.
As an MA student in the Linguistics Department at Eastern Michigan University I undertook fieldwork on Western Sisaala [ssl] in Lambussie, Ghana. 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. :)
My CV is here in PDF. It needs to learn to update itself.
I am also a private consultant for digital archiving projects and work as a freelance web developer.
You can contact me at: stivu.washington.edu
