Research and Innovation

Learn and improve your Haitian-Creole Skills effectively. Kreyòl Modèn is a comprehensive guide to teach and learn the Haitian-Creole language.

Language standardization is the core of language policy and language planning (LPLP), which are two different sides of the same coin. Focusing on speakers, language policy decides which language – or variety of a lan- guage – students should learn, teachers should use in schools, officials should adopt in government, employers and employees should converse in when conducting business and people should speak in public. On the other hand, by targeting languages, language planning engages the processes of selecting a standard variety or a standard language (status planning) and normalizing the selected language’s or variety’s grammar, vocabulary, pro- nunciation and scripts (corpus planning) so that it may best fulfil its desig- nated functions. Thus, language standardization may be broadly viewed from the perspective of language policy, of language planning or of both. This chapter takes this broad perspective of the standardization of minor- ity languages – languages that are either not spoken by the majority of citi- zens or not designated as the national or official languages of a nation-state.

Throughout the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, Central American writers, in and outside of the isthmus, have written in response to political and social violence and multiple forms of racial, economic, gendered, and other oppressions, while also seeking to produce alternative social imaginaries for the region and its peoples. Spanning the civil war and post-war periods and often writing from the space of prolonged and temporary diaspora as exiles, sojourners, and migrants, in their respective works, writers such as Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli, and Martivón Galindo have not only represented the most critical historical moments in the region but moreover transfigured the personal and collective social woundings of Central America into new signs and representations of the isthmus, often from other sites. Read together, their texts offer a gendered literary topography of war, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization and imagine other “geographies of identities” as suggested by Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg for post-conflict, diasporic societies. These writers’ work is testament to the transformative and transfigurative power of women’s writing in the Central American transisthmus.

Intervening in current debates about the place of big data and computation criticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies, Koser advocates a middle ground between distant and close reading to advance early feminist recovery efforts to rescue forgotten authors from obscurity and to expand the body of literary works deemed "worthy" of scholarly attention. Building on the work of feminist digital scholars in the field of English, Koser uses the prolific German author Benedikte Naubert as a case study to explore the ways in which digital databases, digital collection building, and computational criticism can reveal meaningful dialogues between established and peripheral authors and produce new insights into the German literary imagination around 1800.

The main goal of this chapter is to provide readers with a solid understanding of key theoretical and practical issues in Critical Linguistic Awareness (CLA) and Critical Linguistic Awareness pedagogies (CLAp). The first part of the chapter will discuss issues related to language attitudes and ideologies, language and racialization, and antiracist pedagogies in HL education. This part will also address the much-needed turn from multicultural perspectives in curriculum development within the US educational context towards an explicit antiracist pedagogical approach. The second part of the chapter will begin with a description of the foundations of a critical perspective to HL teacher education and continue with some suggestions for preparing pre- and in-service educators to effectively teach HL courses under a CLA framework with an antiracist approach.

Over the past decades, U.S. public discourse has often framed Latinx immigrants as a cultural and linguistic threat, reinforcing racialized ideologies that push Spanish speakers to assimilate. Similarly, African American English is stigmatized as “incorrect,” despite its systematic nature and cultural significance. Yet both Spanish and Hip-Hop Nation Language (HHNL) serve as tools of resistance against racial categorization and assimilation. This study examines how Hispanic immigrant youth in the Washington, D.C. area use Spanish and HHNL on Instagram to construct identity, affiliate with Hip-Hop, and negotiate issues of race, language, and belonging.

This edited volume adopts a new angle on the study of Spanish in the United States, one that transcends the use of Spanish as an ethnic language and explores it as a language spreading across new domains: education, public spaces, and social media. It aims to position Spanish in the United States in the wider frame of global multilingualism and in line with new perspectives of analysis such as superdiversity, translanguaging, indexicality, and multimodality. All the 15 chapters analyze Spanish use as an instance of social change in the sense that monolingual cultural reproduction changes and produces cultural transformation. Furthermore, these chapters represent five macro-regions of the United States: the Southwest, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast.(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Co-authored with Manel Lacorte and Eliza Gironzetti. In F. Salgado-Robles and E.M. Lamboy (Eds). Spanish across Domains in the United States: Education, Public Spaces, and Social Media

This article describes the creation of the Comité du Film Ethnographique (CFE) in 1953 at the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France, as an answer to the need to produce documentaries that would meet both the requirement for scientific rigor and the general public's interest in ethnography and diverse cultures. The CFE aimed to legitimize the use of cinema in a relatively new discipline in the scientific world and to highlight the enthusiasm, professionalization, and autonomy of ethno-cinematographers since the beginning of cinema, while having to address the issues and ambiguities linked to this field of research and its place in society.

One site of Hebrew study has been virtually ignored by stakeholders in the enterprise: Hebrew language programs at American public schools. Despite the fact that these programs exist – and in many cases are expanding and thriving – they remain a virtual black box in Jewish educational research, and are often disconnected from broader Jewish communal and institutional structures. We contend, on the other hand, that Hebrew language instruction, even in public schools, has implications for Jewish education.

OpenITI AOCP is a multi-institutional initiative led by a highly interdisciplinary team of humanities, computer science, and digital humanities principal investigators from Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (Roshan-UMD); Northeastern University’s (NU) NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (London) (AKU-ISMC); the Department of History, University of Vienna; and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, UMD (MITH-UMD). OpenITI AOCP proposes to address the technical and organizational barriers currently stymying the development of Arabic-script OCR and digital text production in a three-stream work plan. OpenITI AOCP’s technical work (workstream #1) will focus on integrating standards-compliant text export functionality (e.g., TEI XML) and the latest advancements in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing with eScriptorium (an open-source and user-friendly OCR pipeline). This work will result in a robust digital text production pipeline for Arabic-script languages that will enable researchers, students, and citizen scientists to produce high-quality, open-access, and standards-compliant digital texts in a user-friendly environment for the first time. OpenITI AOCP team will also build digital capacity in the field of Islamicate Studies and cultivate networks of OCR researchers and interested users through a combination of experts workshops, biannual teleconferences, and pedagogical materials—efforts that will both improve the quality of AOCP’s final deliverables and expand their community of users.