About

The Project:

This project seeks to analyze written Portuguese conversations between American and Brazilian students. Conversations took place on WhatsApp, an application which provides text-messaging services, and were gathered by Professor Ana Paula Carvalho for her own research through the Projeto Bate-Papo Cultural, a project of the Portuguese Conversation course at the University of Pittsburgh. Students provided screenshots of their conversations with their assigned Brazilian "language partners", which were then transcribed and coded according to TEI standards. The objective was to note for linguistic and cultural phenomena, such as: texting conventions (abbreviated forms, informal language, non-obligatory contractions, punctuation), use of emojis, laughter, and errors and corrections.

The Team:

Brandon Rodgers: I'm Brandon and I'm a Linguistics major graduating in December of 2017. My goal is to find a job as soon as possible and I'm proud of all the progress our team made on this project!

Patrick Brooks: Hello! My name is Patrick and I am a student at the University of Pittsburgh and I will be graduating in December of 2017 with a degree in Linguistics. I like to spend time doing things outside like hunting, fishing, hiking and pond hockey and also reading. A lot of reading. Even though this site is about Portuguese, I thoroughly enjoy spending my time learning Irish as a class subject, and now independently, with the hope that one day I can go back to Ireland and use Gaeilge again.

Tyler Bokan: I'm Tyler and I'm a dual Linguistics and French major at the University of Pittsburgh. I will be graduating in 2020. My interests include indigenous languages, particularly Bolivian Quechua which I study at the University.

Zachary Enick: I am a senior at Pitt studying French and Italian language with a minor in Linguistics and a certificate in American Sign Language, and I served as the project mentor. I worked previously on a critical discourse analysis of immigration in the 2016 presidential debates, and I hope to continue to study in the digital humanities long into the future.

Created by: Brandon Rodgers, Patrick Brooks, and Tyler Bokan under the supervision of Zac Enick and Gregory Bondar