Prof. William Kretzschmar, Jr. presented the Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen awards for best poster by a young scholar at the Methods in Dialectology XV banquet on Thurs. Aug. 14, 2014. The prize competition and reception were generously sponsored by the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations; the competition was open to students or scholars whose Ph.D. was earned less than three years earlier. The choice was determined by a three-member jury, chaired by Bill Kretzschmar, based on the poster’s graphic quality and on its contribution to dialectology, i.e., on the cogency and clarity of the argument, the importance of the issue involved, on the innovation the poster represents.
The 2014 winners were Stephanie Leser & Lea Schäfer (Marburg) for ‘Imitation as a method of measuring salience and borrowing’ and Martijn Wieling (Groningen) for ‘Validating and using the PMI-based Levenshtein distance as a measure of foreign accent strength’.