Blog
The blog is, once again, experimental. I never really had any desire "to be a blogger", but sometimes I feel like I have thoughts, ideas, or tutorials to share that are longer than a Facebook post. On the previous instance of this site, I had a picture of Sweet Brown at the top of the blog page, implying ain't nobody got time for that. ...And it was affirmed. In three years, I managed exactly three posts. I blame part of it on having to write posts directly in HTML, thanks to the fact that v1 of the site was static, but really I just didn't make time for it. With v2, it will be more streamlined, so there's no technical excuse. Now it's all rather streamlined with a database and templates, so we'll see how it goes...
My idea is to share random thoughts, tips, and tutorials about research and hobbies. Message me if you'd like to hear from me on a particular topic.
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Impressions of Aruba's linguistic landscape
2022-03-23. Keywords: Linguistic Landscape, Aruba, Multilingualism, Language Attitudes
In February 2022, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Aruba again. I spent a lot of time there as a kid and teenager, and I think the exposure to Aruba and Papiamento at a relatively early age is largely responsible for the path my career has taken. Although my previous visit to Aruba was in 2005 or 2006, before I started my master studies in linguistics, I did one of my senior projects (BA studies) on Papiamento and I’ve always wanted to get back to it somehow. I decided, inspired by Bamberger, Mijts, and Supheert (2016), to have a …
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Bag-o-words: What's that and how do I make one?
2022-02-09. Keywords: corpus linguistics, python, tutorial, linguistic analysis
Over the last few weeks I have been askes several times to explain what a bag of words is, so in this post, I'll present the basic idea about what it is and how to make one. Let's get started.
What's a Bag of Words?
The Bag of Words idea refers to a particular analytical approach to language data, whereby textual data is represented by a list of words and the corresponding number of occurrences of each word. Metaphorically reaching into this bag, you can already tell a lot about the text and its author. For instance the themes in …
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DIY (Server) Room Monitor
2020-10-30. Keywords: blue pill, DIY, arduino
Look at this, two blog posts in a year...in the same month even. :) I'm writing up a little project I just finished.
Not long ago, I moved a computer that I had running more often than not out of the apartment. It wasn't really loud, but it was loud enough that it was annoying enough at night. With the machine out, the house is quiet; call me paranoid, but I don't like not having it in the house where I can see it all the time.
I decided on some kind of monitor, so I shopped around, but everything …
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Abandoned Blog (?)
2020-10-15. Keywords: data analysis, musings
So, the website is almost two years old, and there's still only one blog post to show for it. As I suspected, I didn't have|make the time to post much. I'm tempted to say "that all changes now", but I know it's probably not the case.
2020 has been an interesting year. While I feel like I've been quite busy, I spent a good part of the year without a formal employment. There's not much news in terms of conference presentations or new publications. But I have taught a few courses in Uppsala and Jena. Teaching these courses has been …
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The making of a website
2018-12-19. Keywords: coding, website
As academic researcher, the precarious nature of my continued employment is frequently at the back of my mind. Basically, I'm just about always always looking for my job. In doing so most recently, I have been checking out a lot of other departments, and I noticed many people who are at comparable tiers on the academic ladder have their own personal/professional websites. This got me thinking that I should make one too.
As per usual, I decided to do it my own way, rather than rely on some more common/user friendly/pre-constructed/possibly constraining/possibly proprietary software routes for making the site. I …
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