I am a high-level thinker, focusing on strategy and implementation. I have experience in business planning, work-flow development, product design, services design, project management, business analytics, and the planning of organizational structures. I have worked in the retail, education and training, and nonprofit sectors. I have also worked with archives and libraries.
Many of my projects have revolved around the use-of or development-of information based products, necessitating skills in data management and life-cycle process design and life-cycle management. I have worked as team lead and on distributed teams. I seek out collaborations with subject-matter experts to create collaborative creative works with broad impacts. To add spice to the mixture, I often seek out technical collaborations in minority language or script contexts or collaborations where contract law and legal frameworks require thoughtful consideration.
Master of Nonprofit Managment, 2024
University of Oregon
M.A. in Linguistics, 2021
University of North Dakota
B.A. in German, 2007
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Selected Publications
When conducting fieldwork on tone languages, the linguist choosing to use the IPA to make phonetic transcriptions of tone is presented with a challenge: Current methods of tone transcription in the IPA require a degree of phonological analysis before they can be applied and when applied they do not adequately display pitch distinctions relative to other pitches. I describe this challenge and the bar method as a proposed solution. The bar method visually presents F0 distinctions relative to other F0 expressions without ties to segments. I hope this solution facilitates the discussion of phonetic tone transcription without regard to phonological assumptions, linguistic tradition, or geographical area of research.
Successful writing systems today depend on electronic input methods which can be easily used for producing printed or electronic material. This paper explores keyboard design issues involved in designing two keyboards for two different established orthographies. Both orthographies are based on Latin scripts and cover a total of five minority languages in Mexico (four languages in the Meꞌphaa genus and Sochiapam Chinantec [cso] ). The design issues consider:
Technical differences encountered across major computer operating systems (OS X and Windows)
Computer culture issues like the keyboard layout of the national language
Key stroke frequency of language specific segments
Unicode/non-Unicode issues related to character composition
Designing a Unicode keyboard for data input allowed native speakers of Meꞌphaa to have a greater involvement in the data collected by feeding the documentation team typed data and texts in addition to providing oral data. Early adaption of digital input methods may prove to better meet the needs of both language community and researcher. By giving the language community a keyboard for their orthography the minority language speakers were given the opportunity to enter into, and use, new technological domains with their language.
The (inter)dental approximant is a little-studied speech sound in the Philippines and Western Australia. In this paper, we document the articulation of the sound, providing acoustic and video data from Kagayanen and Limos Kalinga, respectively. The sound is attested in at least fifteen languages. It is contrastive in five Western Australian languages, while in the Philippines it generally patterns as an allophone of /l/ but has emerged recently as a separate phoneme due to contact. It arose independently in the two regions. The sound is easily describable in terms of values of phonological features or phonetic parameters. All of these factors argue for the inclusion of the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Corporate & Personal projects
A Royal Protocol project to use schema.org vocabualry to provide a description context to NFT assets.
A research undertaking at the U of O to look at privacy policy within the United States and gaps in the framework as it is experienced in Oregon.
We edited a special collection at the Journal of Open Humanities Data which addressed the issue of Language Documentation Collections: Assessment and Recognition.
An essential resource for anyone doing research in Kainji langauge speaking areas.
A project collecting Narratives and wordlists from the various lects of the u̱t‑Maꞌin language.
Taking an interdiciplanary look at science and language.
Strategy, technology, and user interaction consultation about RefLex.
Working with several collaborators on Automatic Speech Recognition for low-resource tone languages.
Discussing the business maturity of an ongoing business idea and a business in operation is a frequent task of IDX. This canvas was designed to facilitate that conversation.
An essential resource for anyone doing research in Dan langauge speaking areas.
Working within SIL’s Ideation and Experimentation incubator to produce a product which gives real time language use and valuation metrics derived from a graph based architecture of known relationships.
A collaboration with Becky Paterson to organize the various layers of U̠t-Ma’in linguistic data into a shareable resource.
Clarifying what ‘rights holders’ actually have to hold, and what ‘uses’ of language are provided for and protected under law and practice.
Some changes and additions to Wasta Linux for the language and linguistic Scientist. It is basically a long bash script, and some additional settings.
A Github collaboration to index open source software for minority or low resource languages.
We use the Business Model Canvas to develop the business case for various SIL service offerings.
Strategy and technology consultation with SIL staff to develop interdepartmental communications strategy.
How much work is it to type languages with tonal markers in their orthographies?
Worked with a team to bring modern features via Drupal 7 to the flagship website of SIL International.
Revolutionizing text input. We moved text input from being on a single OS via a non-unicode input method, to working on multiple OSes in Unicode.
SIL Americas Area project to digitize analogue audio mediums.
SIL Americas Area project to digitize photos documenting the people and the work of SIL in the Americas.
SIL Americas Area project to digitize for electronic distribution many of its indigenous language resources in print mediums.
This project seeks to make known issues in Language Resource Accessibility. It is primarily concerned with two facets of accessibility 1) the User Experience related to interacting with archived content; and 2) the aggregation of item level metadata about language resources in collections.
This project seeks to visually display patterns about languages as those visualizations relate to cartography.
A collaboration with an experienced linguist. I contributed extensive metadata and technical audio-visual expertise a team of people from the USA and Meꞌphaa speakers.
An investigation and description of a rare and socially stigmatized speech sound where the tongue protrudes out of the mouth.
Jots, Bibliographies, Research Notes, Professional Notes & Professional Development Notes
Classroom & Workshop leadership
Teaching Assistant University of North Dakota
Personal Trainer Apple, Inc.
Classroom instructor It’s a Small World
Classroom Teacher Junior Achievement
ESL Classroom Assistant International Institute, St. Louis, Missouri
Highlights from my most recent employment history.
Within the context technology startup:
Within the context of grant funded research at the School of Journalism:
Within the context of grant supported work on RefLex:
Within the context of the public election cycle prior to November Elections:
Within the context of IDX Innovation’s mission:
Within the context of SIL’s Training mission:
Within the context of SIL America Area Administration’s mission:
Within the context of SIL America Area Administration’s mission:
Within the context of nonprofit operations:
Working at Apple retail stores I:
Working as SIL-UND staff I:
Professional Affiliations & Technical Workgroups — past & present
Non-Government Organization
Linguistic
Audio Archiving
Educational Metadata
Internet & Language Metadata
Family & Social fit
Marital Status
Strength Finder Themes
Myers-Briggs Personalty Type
I usually vacillate on test between ‘E’ and ‘I’. Usually this means that the NT archetype is much stronger than the single value for ‘E/I’.
Learning a language is almost as easy as forgetting a language. All skills ebb and flow with fluency in various seasons of life.
Operating systems: Linux (Ubuntu), OS X/MacOS 10.6-10.12
Website hosting:
WordPess,
Drupal,
Hugo, MediaWiki
Authorship & Scholarship:
XLingPaper,
Endnote,
Zotero, Markdown,
FLEx, Google Apps
Marketing: Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages,
MailChimp
Coding:
VS Code, Github, HTML,
Bash
Other:
Omnigraffle,
Confluence,
Lightroom
Lesser experience with: ELAN, Praat, Audacity, WeSay, SayMore, Bloom, CSS, Python, MySQL, XML, Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Pro Tools, FinalCut Pro.
Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne
Woodworking, Canvas (Painting, Melted Crayons), Sketching