Keywords

vowel formant visualization, interactive R/Shiny web tools, F1–F2 vowel plotting, Southern vowel system analysis

Abstract

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) is a collection of archival recordings of interviews with 1121 speakers across the southern United States (Pederson, McDaniel & Adams 1986) which has been digitized by the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Georgia. The Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is a 64-speaker subset of LAGS, compiled by Lee Pedersen, that was designed to be socially balanced across 16 sectors of the South (Kretzschmar Jr. et al. 2013). DASS is currently being transcribed, processed, and analyzed at the University of Georgia (Olsen et al. forthcoming), and vowel formant measurements from over half of the audio have been automatically extracted.

This paper introduces the Gazetteer of Southern Vowels (GSV), a web interface that permits users to interact with and visualize the formant measurements extracted from DASS (available at http://lap3.libs.uga.edu/u/jstanley/vowelcharts/). Built in Shiny, a web application framework for R (shiny.rstudio.com), this site combines the powerful data analysis and visualization capabilities of the R programming language—even on devices that do not or cannot run R—with the interactivity of a website.

Currently, GSV has several ways of visualizing vowel data:

  • The Vowel Plot Comparison page displays individual vowel tokens in F1, F2 space, allowing users to compare speakers, groups, or portions of the vowel system.
  • The Interactive Vowel Plot page allows a more focused view of the data and features a single large plot that reacts to mouse clicks (or taps, on mobile devices) with accompanying tables that are populated with data summaries corresponding to the vowel tokens displayed.
  • The Point Pattern Analysis page overlays a grid in the vowel space and, in a chart below, plots the distribution of data in these cells in order of frequency.

Original Publication Citation

Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Rachel M. Olsen, & Michael Olsen. “The Gazetteer of Southern Vowels.” American Dialect Society (ADS) Annual Meeting. Salt Lake City, UT. January 5–8, 2018.

Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

2018

Publisher

American Dialect Society Annual Meeting

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Linguistics

University Standing at Time of Publication

Assistant Professor

Additional Files
The Gazetteer of Southern Vowels.pdf (95 kB)
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