Coding in Linguistics Research

At an excellent Software Carpentry workshop on Bash, I wondered how these skills would be useful to me. How scientists could use programming in their research seemed clear - but in Linguistics, if you don’t do -computational- research?

Several years later, I have put these skills to good use - so here is a compilation. In time, I’ll add links to the code for some of these.

PYTHON

• Automate the creation of 15 experiment run files
• Webscraping a turkish corpus to get word frequency counts
• Identifying the difference between two cognates and their phonological features
• Creating my own work, food and exercise loggers
• Dividing words into morphemes

BASH

• Moving and copying files without errors
• Reminder GUIs to take breaks
• Text replacement
• Copying all lines that start with a particular code to a new file
• Code to open different programs/websites depending on the time of day (to open my work things 9-5)

PRAAT

• Autofilling text grids
• Cutting out sounds into individual .wav files

AUTOHOTKEY

• Shortcuts to open my favourite files, programs and websites
• Text replace for my (email) address, phone number, common emails, common misspellings

EXCEL VBA

• Code to check if a word overlaps in the first sound within ten rows
• Code to check if word exhibits vowel harmony

LATEX

• Slides for teaching and conference presentations
• Handouts
• Conference abstracts
• My MPhil and DPhil theses and submitted work

All in all, totally worth it