Describe your community engagement project! If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, how has last summer’s project influenced your project this year? What tools have you developed to help you work on this project? If your project builds on what you did last year, how are you leveraging your past experience? How does working in a different modality change or deepen your understanding of your research from last year?

This summer, I am in Mérida, the capital city of Yucatan, to help with an ongoing language documentation project at Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY). The project is called "T'aantsil" and it is an online corpus of spoken Maya, with data from across the entire peninsula. All of the uploaded speech samples (mostly one-on-one interviews) are searchable by word, sentence, topic, etc.; the website aims to give a complete representation of the Maya language, and to be free, open, and accessible to a general Maya-speaking public. I'm at UADY just as the project is wrapping up, so my role is a) to help add English translations and an English layer to the database, and b) to check/double-check small details, before the project is fully live.

In many ways, this project builds on my work from last summer, which involved a lot of translation between Maya, Spanish, and English. For example, a major task I had this week was to listen to the audio files that have yet to be transcribed/translated, and tag them by subject matter (for example, "education," "health," "economy," etc.). This work pretty directly called on the skills I developed last summer, when I was transcribing and translating Maya/Spanish rap songs. However, this summer, there is a big difference in the amount of community engagement I am doing: part of my role involves traveling to communities and helping with elicitations/interviews, which will involve a lot of interpersonal skills that I did not use in my research project last summer. Also, while Spanish is the lingua franca of the office setting here in Mérida, working in communities will mean speaking more in Maya (especially because many interviewees have limited comfort with Spanish, if they speak it at all). These visits will start next week, and I anticipate that it will be difficult for me to navigate introducing myself, clearly explaining my purpose, politely asking questions, etc., especially trying to do so in Maya. 

My experience has been great here so far; I've loved exploring the city's parks, museums, and coffee shops, and trying as many new foods as I can. I'm also very grateful to my supervisor and his family for welcoming me so warmly, and inviting me to join them to beaches, mangroves, and to visit his extended family in Mesatunich.