Blackfoot Language Project @ Vancouver DataJam
(image from Shin-you Hou)
Our Project
During the one-day Vancouver DataJam 2021 hackathon our team developed the start of an interactive application that allows an English speaker to learn the Blackfoot language, as well as record audio to determine accuracy.
We decided to build a website that has two primary pieces:
-
A web-based interface that takes a user through a story for exploring and hearing the Blackfoot language.
-
A feature to record and provide feedback on how well the user pronounced the Blackfoot translation.
This project was suggested by the Department of Indigneous Studies and Department of Computing Science, at Simon Fraser University, by Professor Eldon Yellowhorn and Dr. Angelica Lim and is part of the Blackfoot Revitalization Project whose "goal is to build technologically innovative language learning tools to aid in the revitalization and preservation of the Blackfoot language." which had created the Blackfoot Chatbot.
Team Accomplishments
We:
- Created a story interface design:
- Built a working web application that supports story telling, plays Blackfoot audio clips, and has the ability to ingest audio recordings for accuracy analysis:
- Built a Data Science notebook demonstrating data analysis for determining accuracy of pronunciation. Screenshots from the this live Jupyter notebook:
Team Members
Team Lead: Bryce Haley
Mentor: OisÃn Bates
UI/UX Design: Shin-you Hou
Front-End Development: Brian Gershon and Inayat Lakhani
Back-End Development and Data Analysis: Choenden Kyirong
Wrangling Translation Data: Inayat Lakhani
Extra Admin/SME Help: Lisa N. Cao, Ruiz Rivera
Additional Information and Resources
- LinkedIn post congratulating Team 7 on winning a DataJam people's choice award.
- our final project video
- our code repository
Thank you
Thank you to the Vancouver DataJam 2021 organizers for a great event!