1 Content

This workshop is split into two major parts:

• Part 1 - Working with vowel formants
  • Installing required packages
  • Loading in vowel data
  • Data wrangling (adding, removing, and re-coding columns)
  • Calculating summary statistics
  • Generating vowel plots and visualising distributions
  • Speaker normalisation
  • Case study on GOOSE-fronting
• Part 2 - Working with formant trajectories
  • Reshaping data
  • Joining dataframes
  • Visualising formant trajectories
  • Case study on formant dynamics in FACE

2 Structure of materials

The different parts of this workshop can be accessed via the navigation menu at the top of each page.

Throughout these materials, the R code will appear in chunks. In all cases, the output of each chunk of code will also appear below. For example:

15 + 7

## [1] 22

When referring to R packages, functions, or the names of objects loaded into the workspace, they will appear in this font.

3 Setting a working directory

How you organise your files is up to you, but there are certainly good ways and bad ways of doing it. I would recommend writing your code into separate scripts for each part of the workshop, and saving all of these into the same folder - call it something sensible like sociophonetics_workshop. I also recommend making a sub-folder inside this called data, where you can save all the datasets we’ll be working with:

sociophonetics_workshop
 |  sociophonetics_script.R
 |  data
      |   vowels_1.csv
      |   vowels_2.csv

You’ll also want to set this folder as your working directory in R - basically this means that R will look in this folder by default when you’re saving/loading things. For example, I would set my working directory to:

setwd("~/Dropbox/Teaching/sociophonetics_workshop/")

This means that if I want to load one of the datafiles we’ll need for the workshop, I can just say:

read_csv("data/vowels.csv")

Instead of:

read_csv("~/Dropbox/Teaching/sociophonetics_workshop/data/vowels.csv")

You can always check what your current working directory is set to by running:

getwd()

If you want to set your working directory but you’re not sure of the full file path to the sociophonetics_workshop folder you just created, there’s an even easier way of setting it in R. Once you’ve saved your empty script into the folder, you can click at the top of the screen on Session → Set Working Directory → To Source File Location