Naomi Nagy Workshop: Introducing ELAN to Variationist Sociolinguistics

Time:
Venue: Language Lab 1 (Francis Bancroft 1.37)

Naomi Nagy Workshop

Introducing ELAN to Variationist Sociolinguistics

Description:

ELAN (tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan) has established itself as a valuable
tool for language documentation and is frequently used for transcription and
multi-tier mark-up illustrating levels of linguistic structure as well as
translations and glosses. This workshop explores an extension to ELAN's
utility: extracting and coding tokens of linguistic variables for
quantitative analysis in the variationist sociolinguistic framework.

 

Participants will engage in a hands-on  demonstration in which they will
transcribe, extract, code, and (time-permitting) analyze data from a
research project on r-dropping in Boston English.

 

We will demonstrate benefits of this streamlined approach in which
transcription, extraction, coding, and basic analysis are all conducted
within one ELAN file:

 

* seamless connections between recording, transcript, and coding of the
dependent variable (response) and independent variables (predictors). This
facilitates revision and intercoder reliability tests.

* reuse of contextual factor coding (e.g., style, topic, interlocutor) as
well as some structural (morphological, syntactic) tags

* exportability to Excel, R, Rbrul, Goldvarb, SPSS, etc. for multivariate
analysis

* importability of (older) transcripts from Word/txt files

* complex searches and concordancing capabilities to speed up token
extraction

* archivability of all mark-up related to each data file in a consistent and
small-file-size format