Fieldwork

Community-centred fieldwork

The datasets and linguistic analyses behind much of my work originate in sustained collaboration with speakers and communities in Nigeria.

Methodology

Documentation as research infrastructure

My fieldwork combines naturalistic documentation, targeted linguistic elicitation, lexical work, sociolinguistic interviews, procedural recordings, oral history, and cultural documentation.

Primary Data Collection

I collect audiovisual data across a range of communicative settings, including spontaneous narratives, conversations, cultural activities, procedural demonstrations, oral histories, and targeted grammatical sessions.

This allows the resulting corpus to represent both carefully controlled linguistic contrasts and the variability of naturally occurring speech.

Naturalistic speech Elicitation Oral history Procedural data Audiovisual recording

Annotation & Resource Development

Field recordings are transformed into structured research resources through transcription, translation, annotation, lexical analysis, grammatical analysis, metadata management, and archival preparation.

These materials support grammatical description, searchable corpora, lexical resources, community-facing outputs, and computational datasets.

ELAN FLEx SayMore Corpus annotation Archiving

Current field program

Uneme documentation

My current major field project focuses on Uneme, an Edoid language of Nigeria, with documentation spanning language use, grammatical variation, oral history, cultural practices, indigenous knowledge, and material culture.

Language

Naturalistic discourse, lexical data, grammatical elicitation, morphosyntax, tone, tense-aspect systems, negation, focus, and variation.

Culture & Knowledge

Oral history, migration narratives, festivals, traditional practices, material culture, blacksmithing, food production, and local knowledge systems.

Explore the Uneme ELAR collection →

Uneme fieldwork recording session — David and Kayode during a recording session — Uneme-Ekpedo, 2025.

Uneme elders during a traditional board game recording — Elders during a traditional board-game documentation session — Uneme-Ekpedo, 2025.

Grammatical elicitation session in Uneme — Grammatical elicitation session with Gabriel — Uneme-Ekpedo, 2025.

Narrative documentation session in Uneme — Narrative session with Hon. Lawal — Uneme-Ekpedo, 2025.

Research outputs

What the documentation supports

Documentary Resources

Annotated and archived audiovisual corpora covering naturalistic language use, elicitation, oral history, cultural practices, and indigenous knowledge.

Grammatical & Lexical Resources

Corpus-accountable grammatical description, multimedia lexical resources, bilingual dictionary development, and comparative work across speakers and varieties.

  <div class="feature-meta">
    <strong>Field methods</strong>
    <p>
      Naturalistic recording · Elicitation · Interviews · Procedural documentation
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    <strong>Research tools</strong>
    <p>
      ELAN · FLEx · SayMore · Corpus workflows
    </p>

    <strong>Computational connection</strong>
    <p>
      Speech datasets · ASR · Style variation · Linguistic error analysis
    </p>
  </div>

</div>

</div> </section>

Community collaboration

Research is collaborative

This work is made possible through funding from ELDP, collaboration with speakers, language consultants, community researchers, research assistants, elders, and other members of the communities where the documentation is carried out.

I aim to design documentation workflows in which research outputs can support both scholarly inquiry and longer-term community access to language and cultural materials.