Blackfoot Lab Publishes a Paper Describing the Blackfoot Words Database

The Blackfoot Lab has published a paper in Language Resources & Evaluation called “Blackfoot Words: a database of Blackfoot lexical forms”. This describes the structure and creation of Blackfoot Words, a new relational database of lexical forms (inflected words, stems, and morphemes) in Blackfoot (Algonquian; ISO 639-3: bla). To date, the Blackfoot Lab has digitized 63,493 individual lexical forms from 30 sources, representing all four major dialects, and spanning the years 1743–2017. Version 1.1 of the database includes lexical forms from nine of these sources.

The paper and database were made possible by the research assistants in the Blackfoot Lab at Yale, with the following contributions. Substantial parts of the paper were written by Evan Hochstein, Nico Kidd, and Lena Venkatraman. Other contributors to substantial parts of the paper included Tyler Brown, Joshua Celli, McKenzie Denham, Hailey Dykstra, Rodrigo (Hernandez-Merlin), Hannah Morrison, and Matty Norris. The lexical forms were digitized by all listed authors. The underlying MySQL database structure was created by Pinyu Hwang, Diana Kulmizev, and Nico Kidd. Previous assistants who digitized lexical forms over Summer 2020 but who did not contribute to the paper itself include Isobel Anthony, Charelle Brown, Paige Johnson, Shayley Martin, Hema Patel, and Evan Roberts. Natalie Weber planned and directed the project, wrote substantial parts of the paper, and contributed significantly to the database design and data entry.