Learning resources

These resources are here to complement and supplement the learning you do in class and through the textbook. Please make liberal use of them! I will update this page with more resources as the semester progresses.

On this page

1. General support
2. Textbooks
   1. R for data science
3. Topics
   1. Tidyverse
   2. Git & GitHub
   3. Markdown
   4. Quarto
   5. Data visualization
   6. Data wrangling
   7. Regular expressions
   8. Open Access, data publishing
   9. Web scraping
   10. Text processing
   11. Machine learning
   12. Data formats
4. Software tools
   1. Text editors
   2. Speech data
5. Datasets
   1. Directories
   2. Text corpora
   3. Speech corpora
   4. Derived data

General support

Textbooks

R for data science

• The 1st edition of R4DS by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund, published 2017
  • Crowdsourced exercise solutions for the 1st edition
• The 2nd edition of R4DS by Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund, published 2023 (the “upstream” version not edited by Dan)
  • Work-in-progress exercise solutions for 2nd edition, by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel

Topics

Tidyverse

• Posit cheatsheets: 1–2-page reference cards for various packages created by Posit, including tidyverse packages (even more here)

Git & GitHub

• Git download & installation
• LSA 2019 Reproducible Research Workshop tutorials by Pitt’s Na-Rae Han (forked and lightly adapted by Dan): Part 1 Intro to Git, Part 2 Linking Git with GitHub
• YouTube video How to get started with Git and GitHub
• Git - the simple guide
• Git cheatsheet

Markdown

• GitHub Docs: Markdown
• Chrome browser Markdown Viewer extension

Quarto

• Quarto cheatsheet
• Quarto tutorials: Step-by-step tutorials on Quarto
• R Markdown: The predecessor to Quarto

Data visualization

• Intro to ggplot2 by Joey Stanley
• Making vowel plots in R by Joey Stanley
• ggplot2 cheatsheet

Data wrangling

• Hadley Wickham’s J Stat Soft paper Tidy data: a more theoretical approach to the problem of data tidiness
• Project-oriented workflow: A blog post by Jenny Bryan famous for the line

  If the first line of your R script is

  setwd("C:\Users\jenny\path\that\only\I\have")

  I will come into your office and SET YOUR COMPUTER ON FIRE 🔥

Regular expressions

• Regular expression tutorials
• Regex crossword
• stringr cheatsheet, with regex on page 2

Open Access, data publishing

• Justin Kitzes. 2018. The Basic Reproducible Workflow Template. In Justin Kitzes, Daniel Turek, Fatma Deniz (Eds.) The Practice of Reproducible Research.
• Pitt LibGuides Copyright and Intellectual Property Toolkit
• D-Scholarship @ Pitt: Institutional Repository at the University of Pittsburgh

Web scraping

• rvest package
• SelectorGadget: Tool for helping choose CSS selectors
  • Article on how to use SelectorGadget in conjunction with rvest
• CSS dinner: Fun website for learning/practicing CSS selectors

Text processing

• Text Mining with R textbook covers “tidy text” data structure, sentiment analysis, frequency (TF-IDF), ngrams and correlations, topic modeling, and 3 case studies
  • Companion package: tidytext. Uses “tidy data” principles and plays nice with tidyverse packages.
• quanteda package for “quantitative analysis of textual data”. Fairly widely used, and also good for “tidy data” principles
• spacyr wraps the popular and powerful Python spaCy library
  • More powerful than quanteda, but relies on installing a bunch of stuff (incl. Python!)
  • Parsing, lemmatizing, dependencies, entity extraction
  • Interfaces nicely with tidytext
• Older-school R packages for doing text analysis: tm and openNLP.
  • These don’t use “tidy data” principles, but might have more community support resources (e.g., StackOverflow)

Machine learning

• James et al 2021 textbook An introduction to statistical learning: with Applications in R (2nd ed.). Website includes full text (!), R Markdown files for each chapter, and other resources
• caret package

Data formats

• TEI: A Gentle Introduction to XML
• json.org resources:
  • Introducing JSON
  • JSON example (vs. XML)

Software tools

Text editors

• Sublime Text (any OS)
• Notepad++ (Windows only)
  • User defined languages for custom syntax highlighting

Speech data

• Praat: Speech analysis and synthesis software
• Will Styler’s popular Using Praat for Linguistic Research handbook
• Praat scripting tutorials:
  • Original
  • Phonetics on speed
  • Daniel Riggs’s tutorial—has files for download!
  • Section 11 (starting on p. 55) of Will Styler’s Using Praat for Linguistic Research handbook (files can be downloaded here)
• Notepad++ syntax highlighting file for Praat scripting language (somewhat out of date, but still very helpful)
• Praat script collections:
  • Will Styler
  • Henning Reetz
  • UCLA
• Montreal Forced Aligner: Automatic segmental alignment (GitHub)
• Kaldi ASR toolkit
• LaBB-CAT corpus analysis tool
  • Demo corpus with worksheets for self-directed exploration of LaBB-CAT’s functionality
  • R package and Python library for interacting with corpora hosted on LaBB-CAT

Datasets

Directories

• Pitt LibGuides for linguistics data
• Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
• Linguistic Linked Open Data
• General-purpose data repositories:
  • Open Science Foundation (OSF)
  • Kaggle
• Increasingly, authors are publishing their data alongside peer-reviewed articles, so that can be a good place to look.

Text corpora

• Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) corpora index (link, GitHub repo)
• Pitt English Language Institute Corpus (PELIC)
• EnronSent corpus

Speech corpora

• Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL)
• GMU Speech Accent Archive
• TalkBank

Derived data

• Datasets from SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project
• World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) Online
• Datasets from published research. Some examples:
  • Egger et al. 2020. Improving the robustness of infant lexical processing speed measures. Behavior Research Methods (article, data)
  • Koenecke et al. 2020. Racial disparities in automated speech recognition. PNAS (article, data)
  • Sonderegger et al. 2017. The medium-term dynamics of accents on reality television. Language (article, data)
  • Villarreal et al. 2021. Gender separation and the Speech Community: Rhoticity in early 20th century Southland New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change (article, data)
• Datasets from textbook Statistics for linguists: An introduction using R (Bodo Winter, 2019)