Vowel Plots with DARLA and Tableau

If you teach linguistics with an interest in variation in English dialects, World Englishes, or English sociophonetics, you may have found it challenging to include computational vowel analysis in your course without it taking up most of your class schedule. After trying for several semesters to integrate elementary R skills teaching into my "American English" and "English as a World English" classes, I have found that Tableau, being a completely visual stats program, is ideally suited to the task. It allows students to produce vowel plots with quite a bit of refinement without breaking their spirit by forcing them to learn a programming language.

This video tutorial, which I made for my students, has three parts:

• Type A plots: Single-speaker vowel plots

• Type B and C plots: Plotting selected vowels, and plotting more than one speaker

• Type D plots: Compare nucleus and glide for selected vowels

Related links

• Tableau
  The page where students and academic faculty can request a free Tableau license, as well as download the program.

• DARLA
  The semiautomatic forced-alignment and vowel extraction suite that provides the data we use in this tutorial.

• DARLA-conversion
  A convenience app I made (with substantial help from Erica Brozovsky!) in shiny. It converts DARLA-made formant files in CSV format from 'wide' into 'long' format. Will be useful if you want to plot/compare different timepoints across chronological trajectories in your vowel data.