Creating interactive shiny dashboards to showcase sociolinguistic research: Seeing the forest and the trees This workshop is aimed at any sociolinguist with an interest in using shiny dashboards to allow other scholars and the public to more directly engage with and learn from their work. Several new tools have come online in the last few years to make data wrangling and reproducible research more accessible. The purpose of this workshop is to provide sociolinguists an overview of these open-source tools and show several worked examples of making sociolinguistic datasets interactive with R Shiny dashboards.
Three unique datasets, spanning multiple types of sociolinguistic data, are discussed in this workshop. The first dataset that is used is from a syntactic variable from historical linguistics. The second dataset is phonetically gradient data (approximately 3000 tokens) on Spanish lateral production (DV = normalized F2) from 30 speakers, stratified by sex (2 levels), language profile (3 levels), task type (casual vs. careful speech), and 2 linguistic factors (adjacent segment context and syllable position). The third dataset will use geolocated tweets to map lexical variation of borrowings in France and Quebec, with additional social information. Furthermore, we will learn how longitudinal time data spreading over 7 calendar years can be represented on interactive figures, where raw frequency counts will be complemented with statistical estimates for the observed time period.
Participants will leave with a set of open-source and freely available tools to make their data come alive. Some background in R, Rstudio and familiarity with ggplot2 is assumed. There will be a small hands-on activity as part of the workshop. Instructions for the installation of software and data used will be sent out to registered participants a week prior to the workshop. Data and code used for the workshop will be made available to participants.
