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Category: Scripts

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2026

30 Aug: Linguistic mapping: overlapping polygons with points

I recently had a colleague ask me about how to represent language areas for one language group alongside other languages spoken in the area. The observation was that many languages with a small number.. (more)

11 Aug: Gaussian Process for Areal controls in linguistic typology

This is a blog post that I’ve had in mind for awhile, and as I was working on it I realized that there is a bit of groundwork needed. Part of that groundwork was laid in a previous post where I showed.. (more)

28 Jul: Determining language areas in linguistic typology

In a previous post I showed a simple way to control for language family and area with categorical variables in a linear mixed model using Python. In a more recent post I showed how we can plot languag.. (more)

14 Jul: Maps from the taggedPBC: a Python tutorial

When working with languages, it is important to keep in mind the context in which they exist. While “context” has many different facets, a primary aspect is geography. Geographical (and topographi.. (more)

20 Apr: Romanization of scripts and NLP resources

When I began developing the taggedPBC I needed to represent all of the roughly 2,000 languages in a similar way, in order to facilitate comparison. As noted in a previous post, while the majority of.. (more)

08 Apr: Comparing automated Implicit Motive models (tutorial)

Part of my research involves using machine learning and natural language processing to automate content coding. In social science there has long been recognition that humans make inferences about the .. (more)

24 Mar: Git sparse checkout

I sometimes find myself wanting to work on a project involving data or code from Github. Many such repositories are quite small and easy to work with, containing mostly text files. Occasionally, howev.. (more)

10 Mar: Comparative data and localization

When working with actual language data, one major concern is how to represent that data. Many times as researchers the things we want to compare are not equivalent, so we must use the best approximati.. (more)

2023

08 Jun: Teaching ‘Language and the Computer’

Last semester I taught an introductory Natural Language Processing (NLP) course at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I wrote a thread about it on Twitter (now X) but here is a slightly expa.. (more)

2017

06 May: Analyze tone and plot: A Praat script for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing or plotting F0 (pitch) tracks

Along the lines of some of my previous posts on tools for linguistic analysis, I thought I’d post a quick update on a Praat script I’ve been working on. While not part of the series of posts I’ve been.. (more)

12 Apr: Grammatical Analysis: the Transcriber-Toolbox workflow

This is the fourth installment in a series of blog posts where I discuss some of the tools I use for linguistic analysis. In a previous post I described the tools I use for processing and converting v.. (more)

26 Mar: Praat and scripts: an introduction

In this third post about linguistic tools, I’ll be discussing software that I use for acoustic analysis. Praat is one of the premier acoustic analysis tools available for computers. While there are pr.. (more)

2014

17 Sep: An update and a Praat script

Well now that I’ve submitted my thesis I have been happily doing other things than writing. Among which, moving house (I’m staying with a friend for a couple months), planning adventures, hanging out .. (more)