A Historical Sociolinguist's Digital Tools "Starter Kit" (NARNiHS Conference Workshop)

Hands-on Workshop:  A Historical Sociolinguist's Digital Tools "Starter Kit"

Workshop Leader:  Kelly E. Wright, University of Kentucky

This workshop will present a bouquet of digital tools for historical sociolinguistic investigation. We will be working with a prepared dataset to facilitate a common experience and maximize our investigation of the tools, but we will have some opportunity for play! The workshop will contain the following modules:

• A RegEx primer/refresher to enhance basic search strings (demonstrated in a text/code editor [BBEdit or Notepad++] and in the corpus analysis software AntConc). This will illustrate that with some foreknowledge of a dataset, one can maximize search coverage and minimize noise in the results by using this special set of characters to help define search patterns.
• A short introduction to VARD2 spelling normalization software. This software allows for variant spellings in the data to be gathered into a search using the current (or contemporary) standard.
• Guided experimentation with network visualizations using Gephi, revealing the capacity for measurement of sociolinguistic interaction that such analysis adds to historical data.
• (If time allows) a deeper look into the metadata accompanying our dataset to discuss approaches to documentation and standardization of metadata.

This workshop will require participants to bring their own laptops (note that tablets will not run all the software we will be using). If this is an issue, please email Kelly Wright (workshop leader) at kelly.wright {at} uky {dot} edu to discuss other options.

A full set of guided instructions, complete with screenshots, will be provided, alongside directions on how to access the prepared materials, so these tools can be easily returned to and shared.