Curating a corpus of Blackfoot narrative texts

Abstract

This thesis documents the process of curating a corpus of Blackfoot narrative texts, referred to as the Blackfoot Narrative Text Corpus (BNTC) in the thesis. Blackfoot is a language spoken by four communities located in southern Alberta and in Montana of the United States, namely Apatohsipiikani, Kainai, Siksika and Aamskaapipiikani. The aim of this project is to develop a partially linguistically analyzed corpus of Blackfoot narrative texts to support the ongoing documentation and revitalization of the language. The corpus was compiled from published Blackfoot texts. Some texts are fully morphologically analyzed and glossed, while others were transliterated into the modern standard orthography from older spelling conventions but have not been further analyzed. After analysis and/or transliteration, the texts were integrated into the Korp corpus platform. The BNTC is an orthographically homogenous, searchable corpus currently containing 1,711 analyzed words and 8,681 unanalyzed words. It is an open-ended flexible corpus to which new texts and/or additional analysis can continually be added. This project contributes to the broader field of Indigenous language documentation providing a corpus of Blackfoot narrative texts with partial linguistic analysis, an accessible resource for learners, teachers and researchers of Blackfoot.