Josh Wilson Black

@JoshBlack
93 Followers
97 Following
14 Posts
Lecturer at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. Currently working in sociolinguistics, digital humanities, and philosophy (and, when lucky, their intersection).
Websitejoshua.wilsonblack.nz
Josh Wilson BlackMay 22, 2025
Robert FromontMay 22, 2025

New release of nzilbb.labbcat #RStats package 1.4-0
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/nzilbb.labbcat/

Including functions for managing media files, a new upload API,
and support for within-word segment context matching.

#CorpusLinguistics #SocioPhonetics

nzilbb.labbcat: Accessing Data Stored in 'LaBB-CAT' Instances

'LaBB-CAT' is a web-based language corpus management system developed by the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour (NZILBB) - see <<a href="https://labbcat.canterbury.ac.nz" target="_top">https://labbcat.canterbury.ac.nz</a>>. This package defines functions for accessing corpus data in a 'LaBB-CAT' instance. You must have at least version 20230818.1400 of 'LaBB-CAT' to use this package. For more information about 'LaBB-CAT', see Robert Fromont and Jennifer Hay (2008) <<a href="https://doi.org/10.3366%2FE1749503208000142" target="_top">doi:10.3366/E1749503208000142</a>> or Robert Fromont (2017) <<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.csl.2017.01.004" target="_top">doi:10.1016/j.csl.2017.01.004</a>>.

Josh Wilson BlackMay 22, 2025
I'm very excited to see this new work led by Gia Hurring is now out. We did a lot to shore up our approach to PCA for investigating vocalic covariation and find striking commonality of patterns across multiple corpora of New Zealand English and panel data https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394525000043
How stable are patterns of covariation across time? | Language Variation and Change | Cambridge Core

How stable are patterns of covariation across time?

Cambridge Core
Show threadJosh Wilson BlackDec 2, 2024
@yjunechoe Thanks very much! I do have a plan for that. I'm giving a conference presentation on it very soon which should pretty naturally turn into something for JOSS.
Josh Wilson BlackDec 2, 2024

nzilbb.vowels: Vowel Covariation Tools (0.3.1) is now on CRAN. The package contains many useful functions for applying Principal Component Analysis to vocalic data and visualising the results. Website and documentation here: https://nzilbb.github.io/nzilbb_vowels/

#rstats #sociophonetics

Vowel Covariation Tools

Tools to support research on vowel covariation. Methods are provided to support Principal Component Analysis workflows (as in Brand et al. (2021) <doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101096> and Wilson Black et al. (2023) <doi:10.1515/lingvan-2022-0086>).

Josh Wilson BlackFeb 11, 2023
Geoff FordFeb 10, 2023
The Arts Digital Lab's contribution to an edited volume 'Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned' has fourteen authors, including many of the student research assistants who contributed to the workshop process discussed. This was a moment to think about the role and status of our student 'research alongsiders' and really value and learn from their contributions. It has changed the way we work as a lab and research group - link to complete digital volume here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003301097/digital-humanities-workshops-laura-estill-jennifer-guiliano
Digital Humanities Workshops | Lessons Learned | Laura Estill, Jennife

Digital Humanities Workshops is the first volume to focus explicitly on the most common and accessible kind of training in digital humanities (DH):

Taylor & Francis
Show threadJosh Wilson BlackJan 26, 2023
#DigitalHumanities
Josh Wilson BlackJan 26, 2023

I've got a new paper in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. It gives an high-level overview of a method for producing specilised corpora from large digitised newspaper datasets + code. It also contains a discussion of the importance of going beyond keyword search and discussion of a case study of philosophical writing in pre-1900 New Zealand newspapers.. I've written some more about the paper here: https://joshua.wilsonblack.nz/post/digital-scholarship-in-the-humanities/

Code & data: https://osf.io/7crgt/

I hope it's useful!

New Publication: Creating Specialised Corpora from Digitized Historical Newspaper Archives | Joshua Wilson Black

One of the promises of digital humanities for the ‘historical sciences’ is that we’ll be able to, in Tim Hitchcock’s words, shift from ‘piles of books’ to ‘maps of meaning’. That is, we’ll be able to produce high level representations of phenomena across large collections of text.

Joshua Wilson Black
Josh Wilson BlackDec 18, 2022
Jen HayDec 17, 2022
Been longing for the Xmas break to arrive, so you finally have time to learn Principal Component Analysis? Thought so. And you're in luck! As an early present, please accept our new tutorial paper on conducting PCA to investigate covariation of vowels. The recommendations  aren't limited to vowels, and Joshua Wilson Black's detailed supplementaries and associated R package are a wonder to behold. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12479
Show threadJosh Wilson BlackNov 8, 2022
@eloquence amen! Google Reader was very important for my news consumption and I was gutted when it was shut down. Glad RSS is having a bit of a renaissance!
Josh Wilson BlackNov 8, 2022
Erik MoellerNov 6, 2022

If you are (re-)discovering the joy of community-built technology that's not controlled by a billionaire, allow me to plug an even older tech:

An RSS/Atom feed reader is a great companion to a more conversational social media "site" like Mastodon.

Google killed its Reader product years ago, but there are still many great ones. I personally use https://newsblur.com/, which also has a mobile app, synchronizes across devices, and is open source. (If you have a favorite, please reply with it!)