Tutorial workshop on methods for large-scale phonetic data analysis:
further information for participants

We are looking forward to seeing you at the workshop on 7th April. The workshop will begin at 9:30 promptly, in the Vernon Harcourt Room, St Hilda's College. The room will be open from 9:00; please allow time upon arrival to find the room and set up your laptop. There will not be enough power outlets for everyone to use all the time, but there will be 4 extension leads each being able to take 2 or 3 leads from laptops. Therefore, it is advisable to make sure your laptop is fully charged. Registration for the conference opens immediately after the workshop, but there will be a table with name badges for workshop participants to collect upon arrival.

Our slides are now available from here and here. Following the workshop, Peggy Renwick's demonstration slides are available in PDF format here and as a text file of commands here.

If you have any questions, please email baap2014@phon.ox.ac.uk, putting "Workshop" in the subject line.

We shall assume that some participants have quite little technical experience; we are not aiming to teach everyone how to programme, but we are going to walk through a number of practical examples of scripting and using Unix commands, so we would like everyone to come as well-prepared as you can be. Even if you find some of it a bit tricky, you will be able to try out the examples afterwards, and of course you can catch us in the breaks etc in the rest of the BAAP meeting if you have further questions.

Please let us know in advance what operating system your laptop uses. We use mainly Linux, a free, open-source, community-supported operating system cloned on Unix, but we recognise that many people are Windows or Apple users. In fact, we're going to be using a Mac for most of the demos, but we'll also try to give parallel demonstrations on a second projector using Windows and Linux laptops.

If you are an Apple user, note that Apple's OS X is a certified Unix operating system too. You can open a bash (terminal) window by pressing F4 and typing “terminal”. If you haven't done that before, please try it out before you arrive.

If you are a Windows user, things are a little trickier. You have several options:

  1. Sit next to someone with a Mac and work together.

  2. Download a Linux distribution and install it on your Windows machine. We recommend Ubuntu Linux 12.04; you can get it from www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

    You normally put the download onto a DVD or a memory stick and then run it from your DVD or USB. You can choose whether to install it on your machine (as a dual-boot system, alongside Windows), or run it as a trial version. NB doing this with Windows 8 is somewhat tricky, and perhaps best avoided if you are not familiar with this kind of thing.

  3. Download Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows, from www.cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe. Cygwin is not fully-fledged Linux and will not enable you to do everything we will be demonstrating in a Windows environment, but it is an interesting and useful package.

We will be giving everyone a free 32 GB memory stick packed full of data from the Audio BNC (audio part of the British National Corpus) and other goodies. This is write-only so you'll need to create a folder on your laptop to copy files to and in which to work. We suggest you make a folder called “Workshop” to use as a working space for the workshop files. If everyone gives it the same name, we can refer to it like that, and the software we show you will work better that way.

Software that we did not have the foresight to put on the memory stick, but you can now get from here and put in your “Workshop” folder. Note: these are just text files. So if your browser just displays it as a web page, do a "Save As" to download and save them.


Other software to PLEASE install and maybe try out before the workshop – these are not for installing in the “Workshop” folder, note.

Apple OS X users:

Linux users:

Windows users:

Everyone: