How Do You Say It?, one of two DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship projects for 2014, is now live and available to the public. The project, directed by Lucia Binotti in Romance Languages, is one of two faculty projects supported in 2014 by the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship Program, under the auspices of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative.
How Do You Say It? is an interdisciplinary and community service oriented proof of concept project that exploits the Digital Innovation Lab’s DH Press to layer, map and visualize information about the Spanish language varieties used to address Latin@ audiences in the prevention of intimate partner violence. The project’s long-term goal is to assess if the choice of different varieties of Spanish more specifically targeted to a regional sub-group of the larger Latin@ population increases the success/effectiveness of textual literature (brochures, signs, advertisements) as well as direct oral interaction (from support services, doctors, social workers, etc.) in preventing and educating about domestic violence.
The documents repository at a glance
The project site consists of three sets of data visualizations, including a map of U.S. agencies dedicated to combating interpersonal violence among Latin@ communities. The core of the site features a documents repository — visualized in a myriad of ways — of nearly 230 Spanish and English documents dedicated to interpersonal violence prevention and support for survivors. Site visitors can search for documents based on document type, language, type of violence discussed, and services provided. From this corpus, the project team conducted a preliminary linguistic analysis of a subset of documents to begin visualizing textual patterns. The corpus is also available as a plain text zip file for researchers to download and ingest into text mining tools, such as Voyant.
In the coming months and years, Dr. Binotti plans to grow this project in many new directions. She will continue building partnerships with various agencies, as well as extending the linguistic analysis by incorporating that research into her undergraduate teaching.
Explore the Project
Special thanks to the Institute for the Arts and Humanities for its support of Dr. Binotti’s Fall 2014 fellowship.
And stay tuned for an announcement of the launch of POPP, our other faculty fellowship project, in January 2015!