The Spanish and Portuguese Research Apprenticeship Program (SPRAP), allows undergraduate students to participate in research under the mentorship of senate faculty, non-senate faculty, and graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In parallel with the campus-wide Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP), participation in SPRAP is beneficial to both parties. Senate faculty, non-senate faculty, and graduate students will benefit from the work that undergraduate students provide for their research project/task and from the opportunity to train and mentor undergraduate students. Participating undergraduate students will benefit from acquiring professional experience, research skills, and knowledge. Participating Students will also be enrolled in 1-4 units of Spanish 197 on a P/NP grading basis.
PhiloBiblon: A Database on Medieval Iberian Literature
Sponsor: Dr. Óscar Perea-Rodríguez
PhiloBiblon is a database for the study of the Romance literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia (Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Galician). It currently contains over 420,000 records thanks to forty years of work by dedicated volunteers in the U.S., Spain, and Portugal. It has become an indispensable resource for Hispanists because of its comprehensive coverage of primary sources, both manuscript and printed, the texts they contain, the individuals and institutions involved with the production and transmission of those sources and texts, the libraries holding them, relevant secondary references, and authority files for persons, places, and institutions.
We are currently involved in the process of migrating all data from a siloed database system to a Linked Open Data via FactGrid. Therefore, we are offering to UC Berkeley students the possibility of joining us towards the completion of this task via a) cleaning registers on spreadsheets; b) incorporating new data entry in our database; c) spreading the progress of the project through social networks and our Youtube channel. All tasks would be completely remote, so that you would be able to manage your schedule at your convenience, provided that you fulfill the agreed amount of 4 units (4 hours per week). If you have experience as Community Manager in social networks, please emphasize this in your application. We all are looking forward to welcome you in the pioneer Digital Humanities venture applied to Medieval Iberian studies, a project established at UC Berkeley during the last four decades!
Spanish-English Bilingualis in (the) California (Bay Area)
Sponsor: Dr. Justin Davidson
Thanks to a University of California Multicampus Research Grant, UC-Berkeley is partnering with UCLA and UC Santa Cruz to document, linguistically analyze, and ultimately legitimize Spanish-English bilingualism in California. Despite having more Spanish speakers than any other Spanish-speaking country in the world (save Mexico), the United States is often considered a largely monolingual English-speaking country. The long history of (Standard) English hegemony in the United States has resulted in, among many other things, a general lack of empirical research on US Spanish and its speakers. Accordingly, during the Spring of 2024, we (at Cal) will conduct a total of 100 sociolinguistic interviews with a diverse population of Spanish-English bilinguals in California (half with Spanish as their first language, half with English as their first language). Speech data, collected in both Spanish and English, will be used to populate a freely accessible online corpus of California Spanish-English speech that will position the University of California as a lasting leader in bilingualism research. Specifically, students that assist in this project will be required to complete the following tasks, and will notably be compensated $25 (via Amazon gift cards) for every successful interview they perform:
- Attend a training workshop to learn how to use recording equipment and conduct a sociolinguistic interview in both English and Spanish
- Borrow the recording equipment and perform sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals that reside anywhere in California
- Responsibly manage the delivery of $25 Amazon gift cards to study participants as compensation (i.e., every person that is interviewed is to receive a gift card as compensation for their participation, and separately for every successful interview performed, you earn your own $25 Amazon gift card, ideally up to 10 interviews per SPRAP student)
- Upload the speech files to an online server
PhiloBiblon: A Database on Medieval Iberian Literature
Sponsor: Dr. Charles Faulhaber
PhiloBiblon is a database of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan primary sources (manuscripts and early printed books) of medieval Iberian culture along with the texts they contain, the individuals and institutions involved with the production and transmission of those sources and texts, and relevant secondary references. This project will be jointly supervised by Charles Faulhaber and Óscar Perea. The task of the apprentice will be to help clean up the errors and inconsistencies in legacy data in Spanish, Catalan, or Portuguese in order to map it into FactGrid, a database for historians.
Holocaust Memory in Latin America
Sponsor: Dr. Estelle Tarica
Participants with offer research assistance for a long encyclopedia article that Dr. Tarica is writing on the memory of the Jewish Holocaust in Latin America. Research assistants will work online with the library catalog and other sources to help me put together a working bibliography, especially with sources from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica. The topic involves learning more about Jewish communities in Latin America as well as the diverse meanings of the Holocaust and the evolution of a "multi-directional memory" about it.