Becky Everson

About

I'm a Fall 2022 Masters student at the University of Rochester, in the Language Documentation and Description program. I graduated from the University of Rochester in 2016 with a B.S. in Computer Science, B.A. in Linguistics, and minor in Spanish. After graduating, I worked at FactSet Research Systems in Norwalk, CT as a Software Engineer, where I programmed mainly in JavaScript and Python.

Software Engineering → Language Documentation?

I believe there is a lot of work to be done in the software space of Language Documentation! While there has been a lot of progress recently, there is only a small number of linguists with formal software training. There is a lot of potential to develop tools that are more accessible to language communities to start their own documentation projects. I want to complete a linguistic fieldworkd project to understand what types of tools might be most important for communities.

CV

Linguistic Interests

Language Documentation and Description, Sociolinguistic Variation, Community-Based Language Documentation, Language Revitalization, Tools for Language Documentation, Bantu Languages, Fieldwork

General Interests

Traveling, Hiking, Running, Vegetarian Cooking, Programming, Classic Rom-Coms, K-Pop

Projects

Ongoing

Typology of Sociolinguistic Variation

Working towards a typology of sociolinguistic variation (SV) in order to provide a toolkit for grammar-writers to better describe and contextualize SV, and to make grammars more useful for sociolinguistic and historical linguistic studies. See our scripts in our Github repo for the Rochester Grammar and Variation lab led by Nadine Grimm and Maya Abtahian.

Online Collaborative Platform for Community Language Documentation

Ongoing development for a mobile application meant to assist in virtual language documentation largely run by a language community. Currently undergoing field tests with a speaker of Kihavu, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. See our Computel-3 paper and presentation.

ELAN to Latex Small Caps Parser

Writing a script to assist Luis Ulloa in automatically formatting his linguistic examples from ELAN into Latex.

Past

Ndebele documentation

Final class project for the Field Methods class at the University of Rochester. Focused on Ndebele gender. Worked with a Ndebele speaker who was also a student at the university. Taught by Nadine Grimm.

TB to Latex

Programmatically converted Scott Grimm's Dagaare Toolbox data into a Latex dictionary. Presented at ICLDC-5 as a poster. Grammatical sketch including the dictionary data is published here.