HHU - Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South

In this talk, I will introduce the Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South project (https://raaohgs.oral.history.ufl.edu/) started in 2021, supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), educators and other community members. I will focus on reporting our computational efforts in making the voices and histories of African Americans who reside in the Gulf South accessible.

Bio: Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang is a University Professor in English Linguistics with specialisations in Phonetics/Phonology/Morphology at the Department of English Language and Linguistics, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He holds a courtesy appointment at the University of Florida in Computational Language Science. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Linguistics from University College London, an M.Eng. and a B.A. in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and his postdoctoral training from Yale University. He's the director of the Speech, Lexicon, And Modeling lab (SLaM lab) (https://slam.phil.hhu.de/).

His research interests lie in computational linguistics with a special interest in speech technology (phonetics and phonology). He conducts data-intensive research on linguistic variations, human health research and language technology. His current interdisciplinary research projects include developing a smart pseudo-palate for linguistic and biomedical applications with a focus on evaluating parkinsonism, developing a sociolinguistic-enabled virtual health assistant for African Americans and mitigating social biases in speech technology against African American English speakers.