Documenting changes in the lives and language of people living in Michigan

MI Diaries (“Michigan Diaries”) is a VIP team focused on documenting changes in the lives and language of people living in Michigan. Across the state, kids, teens, and adults send us ‘audio diaries’ recorded on their phones or other devices, using a mobile app that we developed. We create and send new prompts each week to get the diarists thinking. MI Diaries has been running year-round since 2020. Our ever-growing archive of audio recordings and transcriptions is a valuable resource for research projects at MSU. Parts of the archive are also available to the public.

Student involvement is essential to our core operations:

• continuously collecting and processing our data
• recruiting new diarists and retaining our current diarists
• talking to the public about our work

No special background or training is required to get started. We provide clear pathways for students to progress from exploratory roles to positions with more responsibility. Some students are offered subteam leadership or project management roles as they gain more experience and skills.

MI Diaries is affiliated with the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab, so our primary research questions are related to understanding how language varies (across places, social groups etc) and how it changes over time (across generations, within lifespans). But students from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome. Some aspects of our project and data are especially well-suited to research in linguistics, education, digital humanities, and the social sciences; others are relevant to PR, communications, design, and user experience; still others to data science and computer science.

Faculty leads cannot supervise many individual research projects, and priority will be given to Linguistics majors or to research that will materially improve MI Diaries in some way. But you’ll see how undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members pursue collaborative research, and there may be opportunities to contribute to existing research subprojects. We also welcome students who are not primarily seeking to address a research question, but who are looking for experience in the core operations listed above.

Click here to go to the MI Diaries website

Methods and Technologies

All/most members of MI Diaries learn and use the following methods and tools:

• Best practices in eliciting spontaneous narratives
• Meeting organization skills e.g. agenda creation, note-taking
• Ethical considerations for handling sensitive topics
• MSU IRB ethics training
• Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office products
• Time-tracking software such as Jibble

Depending on their role, team members also learn/use:

• Best practices in talking to the public about language variation
• Protocols for verbatim transcription of spontaneous speech
• Acoustic phonetic software such as Montreal Forced Aligner, new-FAVE, and Praat
• Best practices in coding linguistic and demographic data
• Best practices in curating a public facing archive
• Graphic design applications such as Canva
• R Statistics and ggplot for data analysis and data visualization

Areas of Interest

• Linguistics
• Narratives and story-telling
• Digital Humanities
• Outreach to the public
• Education
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Data Science
• Computer Science
• User Experience
• Mobile app design
• Website design
• Graphic Design
• Public Relations

Preferred Interests and Preparation

We welcome students from all academic backgrounds and levels of experience. MI Diaries has long fostered an environment in which students can come and explore. We mainly look for curiosity, creativity, commitment, reliability, and a willingness to learn. Desirable but not essential interests include:

• Story-telling and hearing people’s everyday experiences
• Life in Michigan today
• Language variation and language change
• English dialects
• Science communication
• Working with language corpora

Useful qualities include:

• Enthusiasm for contributing to a diverse and interdisciplinary team
• Openness to feedback
• Attention to detail

Meeting Schedule & Location

• Meeting Time: Tuesdays 4:00pm to 5:00pm on Microsoft Teams
  • Subteams might also require regular or ad hoc meetings on Teams, but these will be arranged to suit all relevant members.
• Location: Will be shared before or on the first day of the semester.

Team Advisors

Dr. Betsy Sneller
Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, Michigan State University
sneller7@msu.edu

Dr. Betsy Sneller is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She is a director of the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab and the lead investigator for the MI Diaries project. Dr. Sneller’s primary research interest is in language variation and change, particularly phonological change (how people’s mental representation of speech sounds changes over the generations).

Dr. Suzanne Wagner
Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, Michigan State University
wagnersu@msu.edu

Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She is a director of the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab and the co-lead investigator for the MI Diaries project. Dr. Wagner’s primary research interest is in language change across the lifespan and how it intersects with language change in communities over time.