Week 7: July 29 - August 2
It felt like this week I did several things at the same time! I originally started to work on the statistics part and was trying to see what kind of structure I could generate from the EAF files in the corpus. After a day or two of poring around and reading a lot of papers me and my mentor agreed that what I was looking for is "N-gram analysis" where we looked at the relationship between annotations in a specific tier. N-grams is the process of associating adjacent annotations into a greater "unit" where we then studied the frequency counts and made statistical analyses on the resulting data. It was a fascinating read to learn about the concept behind "Contingency Tables" as I touched upon them very briefly in my statistics class! I liked how there was so many different ways to look at the same 2x2 table and it would eat up the rest of my time this week studying and understanding the various formulas and trying to figure out which was relevant to our team's work.
At the same time, I spent two days helping the team on a different project they were working on. As part of their research, they needed to solicit feedback from the deaf community on their revisions to the avatar. They had an old version of the survey program, but since they updated it with new tests they had to redo the explanatory videos. That was part of the IRB agreement, and it was a bit perplexing for me to learn that there is so much work they had to do just because they changed a few things here and there. Anyway, part of the work was to film me signing in ASL various texts related to the test. For example, they had an introduction, several questions, instructional, conclusion, etc segments that I did. After a few takes of me screwing up ( I switched right vs left in the video, ha! ) we were very happy with the results and they will be using it to test the coarticulation changes in the avatar.
Finally, the last thing I did this week was to notice that the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing were issuing a call for participation. I learned about the conference through AccessComputing and thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for me to showcase a poster of my work this summer. My mentor enthusiastically approved me setting up some time to type the poster proposal. I worked with another author, Marie to come up with the outline and grumbled about the concept of working over the weekend to meet the deadline!