William Kretzschmar, Jr. (PhD, English, University of Chicago, 1980) is a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Georgia. His major publications include the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (with Clive Upton and Rafal Konopka; Oxford U Press, 2001); Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data (with Edgar Schneider, Sage Publications, 1996); Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (with Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson; U Chicago Press, 1994). The primary outlet for his Linguistic Atlas research is the Linguistic Atlas web site. Current work on the Atlas pursues three primary targets: 1) creation of text-encoding and presentation format for Atlas interviews which will allow for linked text, sound, maps, and analytical information for a wide range of users; 2) advanced methods of quantitative analysis, including technical geography; and 3) creation of new field work methods which will support research in speech sciences and NLP as well as linguistic geography and sociolinguistics. These interests branched naturally into corpus linguistics, where he is directing corpus and text encoding activities for a large National Cancer Institute grant to study tobacco documents, and text analysis, as shown by his special issue of Language and Literature (vol. 10.2, 2001) on literary dialect analysis with computer assistance. He served as editor of Journal of English Linguistics for 15 years. He now serves as editor for three Linguistic Atlas projects (LAMSAS, LANCS, LAWS) and a board member for several others; as an executive board member for the international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium; and as an advisory board member or consultant for various professional journals and dictionaries, including preparation of American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary. He has performed consulting work over the years for forensic, industrial, and academic clients.

Clayton Darwin (ABD Linguistics, University of Georgia, 2003; MA English/TESL, Central Washington University, 1997; BA Spanish, Central Washington University, 1995) currently manages the Tobacco Documents Project at the University of Georgia, a National Cancer Institute funded grant to study deception in tobacco industry documents, where he designed and implemented the XML protocol for document storage and is developing methods for classification and description of industry documents. He also serves as an advisor and research consultant to the Linguistic Atlas Projects at the University of Georgia. Formerly an Army Airborne Ranger with the 2/75 Ranger Regiment, he has now turned his attention to the study of language, and specializes in large-scale document analysis and natural language processing. As a programmer for TLTG, his primary languages are Prolog and Python. Some of his recent works include Looking for the Smoking Gun: Forensic Corpus Exploration of the Tobacco Documents (with William Kretzschmar, Doug Biber, and Donald Rubin) at the American Association for Applied Corpus Linguistics 2002, Fourth North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching; Text Encoding for Linguistic Analysis of Tobacco Documents (with William Kretzschmar and Donald Rubin) at the South-Eastern Conference on Linguistics November 2002 (SECOL LXVII); Managing Complex Corpora with XSLT: An Example from the Tobacco Document Corpus (with Cati Brown) at the Linguistics Society of America 2003 Conference; The Tobacco Documents Corpus: Archiving the Industry (with William Kretzschmar and Don Rubin) at the Association for Computers and Humanities 2003 Conference; and New Tools for Tobacco Document Research (with Don Rubin and William Kretzschmar) at the NCI Tobacco Industry Documents Research Investigators Meeting 2003. He has performed consulting work for industrial and academic clients.

Eric Rochester (ABD English, University of Georgia, 2004; BA, English, Southern Adventist University, 1993) works as a UNIX systems administrator, database administrator, and web designer at the Linguistic Atlas Projects at the University of Georgia, developing and maintaining computer resources. He has been programming in a variety of languages—including C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, and Python—for over twenty years. He develops curricula for and teaches Online @ UGA, a course in which students learn to use the computer resources available to them at the University of Georgia. In the past he has also taught online sections of freshman composition and provided computer instruction and support for other freshman composition instructors. He has consulted for a major dictionary publisher, providing pronunciations, and has developed computer tools to aid in writing and maintaining dictionary pronunciations. He has written papers and presented at conferences on querying databases using English, designing web sites for publishing linguistic data, and comparing the different tools available for analyzing language with computers. His expertise is in representing and studying texts and linguistic data using computers.

Betsy Barry (MA Linguistics, University of Memphis, 1998) works as a web developer and site manager for the Linguistics Program at the University of Georgia and for the Society for Pidgin and Creole Languages, an international linguistic organization. She also works at the Linguistic Atlas conducting field research and is developing a text-encoded, natural language database of Atlanta speech. She currently teaches Online @ UGA at the University of Georgia, and is responsible for on-going curriculum development for that course. She has presented papers on corpus linguistics and various other linguistic topics ranging from Creole languages to linguistic variation in American English. Her current research focuses on computational methods for large-scale linguistic analyses.