Project Name: Project MapLemon

Grantee: Theodore Manning

Discipline: Linguistics, Digital Humanities

Funding Cycle: 2022–2023

Project Status: In Progress

White Paper: 

 

About the Project:

 

Project MapLemon is a corpus for stylometric demographic identification of 21,000+ words across 185 participants originally created to obtain a baseline corpus for linguistic variation among North American English speakers. The corpus contains responses from 10+ linguistic backgrounds, and 40+ US states and Canadian provinces. Project MapLemon has innovated a new method for data collection for linguistic variants in the natural, digital written word. MapLemon utilizes a hand-drawn map and asking participants to give directions via this map, as well as asking participants for a recipe for lemonade. In addition to its novel collection methods, MapLemon contains responses from 91 transgender and non-binary people; analysis of which has shown that transgender people write most similarly to their gender rather than their sex assigned at birth, and furthermore that there may be in existence a “trans accent”. Currently, Project MapLemon is seeking to expand the corpus, particularly looking for Male-to-Female (MTF) transgender respondents; as well, the Project is looking to analyze responses from non-binary individuals in a way that prevents binarism.