Voices of Oakland
Keith Johnson, Professor
Linguistics
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
This project aims to document conversational speech of ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds who grew up in Oakland. Our main interest is in how people pronounce their words - is there an "Oakland accent" but the recordings are also social records from people spanning a wide range of age and social class in Oakland.
Role: The main task for the semester is to produce transcripts of interviews using otter.ai. To make this more interesting (because it is rather tedious) and meaningful we meet once a week to work on our transcriptions together with the PI. It is really interesting to pay close attention to how people say things, and what they talk about. See some movie clips at our web page.
The second main task is to conduct more interviews. I am looking for students who would feel comfortable getting the word out about the project and traveling to Oakland (with the PI) to conduct on-camera socio-linguistic interviews with Oaklanders.
Qualifications: Required: You should have time for a weekly project group meeting where we will work together in the same room, transcribing interviews. To interview people you should like to talk to people, and be comfortable using audio/video equipment and you should be able to take time in the week to go to Oakland and meet people at senior centers, recreation centers, churches, etc. and also You will need to complete training for human subjects research (see https://cphs.berkeley.edu/training.html).
Desirable: It would be great if you grew up in Oakland and could reach out to family and friends for the project. It would also be a boon to the project for you to have taken course work in qualitative research, in anthropology, sociology, or linguistics. Finally, the project needs a web page, so if you have web design skills we might be able to use you.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Downtown Oakland Senior Center, 200 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94610 Laney Community College, 900 Fallon St, Oakland, CA 94607 Other off campus sites to be determined.
Related website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/VO
Social Sciences