Digitization of Atlas Audio Recordings

FAIN: PW-50007-08

University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)
William Kretzschmar (Project Director: July 2007 to April 2012)

Digitization of interviews from the Linguistic Atlas Project, including 6,400 hours of audio interviews with speakers of American English from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) consists of a set of survey research projects about the words and pronunciation of everyday American English, including thousands of interviews across the country from the 1930s through the present. This project will digitize all surviving LAP audio recordings, a total of 6400 hours from interviews in the 1960s through the present. Interviews consist mainly of six-hour conversations between a field worker and a speaker native to a survey area, about the common circumstances of life in America (e.g. family, housing, food, customs, flora and fauna). The interviews will be indexed by time and topic, and made available on the LAP Web site and on CD. Complete information about speakers and interviews (metadata), created according to archival standards, will be stored with the topical index in a software system built to support public Web access to archives of regional language varieties. The audio archive will preserve the 20th-century voice of America.