User:Alisondoepker/William Kretzschmar

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. is a linguist, researcher, and scholar in the digital humanities. He is currently a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA with appointments in the Departments of English and Linguistics. Kretzschmar started his work as a medievalist before transitioning to research in English Language Studies. Despite his significant linguistic contributions, Kretzschmar's undergraduate and master's degrees are in Medieval Studies, from University of Michigan and Yale, respectively. He then received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation was in literary and historical context.^[1]

Little is known about Kretzschmar's early life. He is originally from Ann Arbor MI, where he later returned for his undergraduate career at the University of Michigan. He worked a variety of jobs while in college, concluding with his work for the Linguistic Atlas Project.^[2]

As a linguist, Kretzschmar has worked for a variety of linguistic projects, including Roswell Voices in Roswell, GA; the American Dialect Society, where he was the President; and the Journal of English Linguistics. He most notably served as Editor Emeritus of the Linguistic Atlas Project, which has since been taken over by his student, Allison Burkette. Additionally, he has written over one hundred articles on topics ranging from language variation in American English to medieval literature to digital humanities. Some of his research interests include textual analysis and banking using computer software, data anaylsis and technical geography, and development of new field work methods for speech sciences. ^[3]

As a professor, Kretzschmar has taught courses as varied as his research, ranging from freshman seminars in English to graduate courses in Literary History and Dialects ^[1]. He has been a professor at the University of Glasgow, the University of Michigan, and the University of Opulu, among others^[1]. He has taught at the University of Georgia for over 36 years, where he is the Harry and Jane Wilson Professor in Humanities and Fellow in Artificial Intelligence^[1]. During his employment at UGA, Kretzchmar has published books such as Language and Literature, The Linguistics of Speech, and Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States.^[4]

Life and Career

Education

Kretzchmar attended the University of Michigan from 1972 through 1976 as an undergraduate, where he was permitted to develop his own major in Medieval Studies. This later became the basis for a University-sponsored major in this field.^[2] While at Michigan, Kretzchmar was enrolled in the Honors program, an improvement upon his high school career where he became "bored" of the general education courses he was enrolled in. After leaving the University of Michigan, Kretzschmar enrolled at Yale University in the Fall of 1976 to earn a Master's degree in Medieval Studies. ^[1]Following his time at Yale, Kretzschmar attended the University of Chicago beginning in 1980 to pursue a PhD in English, where his dissertation focused on the literary and historical contexts that surrounded Henryson's Fabillis^[1]. During his time at UChicago, Kretzchmar began working for the Linguistic Atlas Project, which he later took leadership in.^[2]

Research

Throughout his career, Kretzschmar has been involved in numerous research studies. One of the popular ones that received much attention is the Automated Large-Scale Phonetic Analysis: DASS Pilot, with Margaret Renwick conducted 2016-2018, which received $377,295 in grants. Another well known study is his Roswell Community Language Project, (2006-2007) which conducted $6,500 in grants. Others include Collaborative Research on the Geography of English Dialect Features by Self-Organizing Maps (1999-2002), Mapping Southern English(2003), and Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the Local Construction of Identity: Sociophonetic Variation in Smoky Mountain African American Women's Speech(2005-2006) with Becky Childs. While the list goes on, his most well known work is with the profound "Linguistic Atlas Project".

Kretzschmar's work in the Linguistic Atlas Project furthered the digitization of project developed by the American Dialect Society in 1929, of which Kretzschmar was the president of from 2007 to 2009. Under this position Kretzschmar was The Linguistic Atlas Project is considered a large scale addition to the field of corpus linguistics, centered on regional differences and change in American English. The project divided the United States into regional categories, such as New England (LANE) and the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). Surveyors were tasked with collecting phonologic, morphologic, and syntactical data throughout their assigned regions. Kretzschmar's research focused on the Middle and South Atlantic States, serving as the editor of the project. His contact with the project began in 1984 with an index of the lexical items included in the LAMSAS division of the research. His position in this division lasted two years, which was directly followed by a membership with the American Dialect Society. In 1993, the University of Chicago Press published Kretzschmar's handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States. Some of his more recent contributions to the project have been in the form of digitally categorizing the data of the project within its website. The website for the Linguistics Atlas Project is currently being modified to allow for audio and field documents to exist in a digital space.^[1]

The project is still actively surveying in the Western United States.^[5]

Achievements

Honors and Awards

After earning his A.B. in Medieval Studies from the University of Michigan in 1976, Dr. William Kretzschmar completed his Master's degree in Medieval Studies from Yale University in 1976. He then continued to earn a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. His graduating thesis was "The Literary-Historical Context of Henryson's Fabillis" ^[3].

Dr. Kretzschmar has received a number of honors and awards for his contributions to the field of Linguistics. He served as President of the American Dialect Society for 2 years. He has previously been on both the Executive and Publication Committees for the Association for Computers and the Humanities for a combined seven years, the Nominating Committee for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section Z, for three years, founding board member for the South Atlantic Regional Humanities Center for eight years. For the TEI Consortium, he was a member of the Nominating Committee for two years and a member of the Board of Directors for two years ^[1]. He held the 2014 American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship which was used to fund his research to create computer programs used to replicate changes in language. ^[4] Dr. Kretzschmar is also a fellow within the Artificial Intelligence Program. ^[1]

In addition to holding his current position as the Harry and Jane Wilson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia, Dr. Kretzschmar also holds academic appointments at Uppsala University and the University of Oulu. In the year 2019, Dr. Kretzschmar was identified as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Adam Mickiewicz University and at the UGA at Oxford program, he has been Faculty in Residence three times. ^[1]

Other Literary Contributions

In addition to his various publications, Dr. Kretzschmar has also assisted in editing different literary works over the course of his career. For fifteen years, he was an editor of the Journal of English Linguistics and in 2001, he served as a coeditor of the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English. In addition to editing, Dr. Kretzschmar has also been consulted for pronunciations for the Oxford English Dictionary online, among other dictionaries in the Oxford program. ^[1][4]

References