As the leaves change: Crow updates

As the Fall semester progresses, the Crow team has been hard at work submitting grants, attending conferences, and working on prototyping.

Welcome new Crowbirds!

We have welcomed three new Crowbirds onto our team! Tony Bushner, Ashley Velázquez, and Bill Hart-Davidson. Tony has joined to work on various development and prototyping tasks as Crow starts designing database structures. Ashley’s focus is in Second Language Studies. S he has been helping with the development of PSLW and with research in the citation project. Bill Hart-Davidson is the most recent addition to our team. He will serve as the Project Coordinator for Michigan State University. He will lead the user-experience research and development team for this project to ensure its usability and usefulness.

Grants

The grants team has been working their way through their list of grants from the beginning of the semester. We have submitted our CLA Enhancing Humanities grant, and are waiting to hear back. We planned on using this grant for travel expenses to the Computers and Writing conference, and to fund some of our graduate researchers during the Spring and Summer terms.

The Humanities Without Walls Changing Climate Initiative grant has also been submitted. We are waiting to hear back on this one as well. We’re excited about the grad lab practicum component, since Crow is such a good fit.

I recently completed, with the help of Bradley, the ASPIRE grant. We were approved for $1,500! This money will help fund travel expenses for our graduate students and staff to present at three upcoming conferences. Shelley Staples also learned that her University of Arizona Small Faculty Grant, to begin the development of a corpus at Arizona, was funded at $3,000.

Hadi, Bradley and I are still working on the final drafts of our CLA Non-Laboratory grant to help us revamp our resource room. We should have it submitted soon! Our next big grant that we will be working on is the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Extension Gran t. A list of completed and awarded grants is on our web site.

Conferences

A few of our Crowbirds, Shelley Staples, Ola Swatek, Terrence Wang, and Hadi Banat just returned last week from the Symposium on Second Language Writing (SSLW) Conference at Arizona State University. A recap of the event will be available soon.

Prototyping

Things have been slow but steady with prototyping for Crow. Recently, we revisited our environmental scans and the goals for the project in an effort to explore a variety of new platforms which could host the project. Also, we have continued our effort to find resources within our institutions to help support the site development. In the coming weeks, we will move to creating a closed test site using existing materials in our possession. We soon help develop recruitment materials and protocol procedures to gather more texts for the corpus in December.

The corpus

We will begin recruitment for our corpus soon. We will be calling on English 106 and 106I instructors here at Purdue to submit their student papers and pedagogical materials for us to examine and add to our corpus. A group of researchers are working together to develop recruitment processes which support prototyping efforts. We’re expecting to cross eight million words with the PSLW corpus this fall.