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SUMMARY:Crowdsourcing big data in English dialectology - Bert Vaux (Depart
 ment of Linguistics\, University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20151112T150000Z
DTEND:20151112T153000Z
UID:TALK61737@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:26863
DESCRIPTION:The Harvard Dialect Survey of 2002-3 represented the first lin
 guistic foray into large-scale crowdsourcing (60K respondents) incentivize
 d by dynamic geospatial imaging. Working in tandem with statistics graduat
 e student Josh Katz of North Carolina State University I expanded this in 
 2013 to make the New York Times dialect quiz\, which deployed Josh's brill
 iant tweaks of existing clustering\, visualization\, and prediction algori
 thms to attract responses to my survey questions from more than 21 million
  humans. Since that time I have been collaborating with forensic linguist 
 Jack Grieve of Aston University to extract linguistically-significant patt
 erns and trends from our megacorpus. In this talk I report on the developm
 ent of the New York Times quiz and some of the leading discoveries that ha
 ve emerged from it\, including isogloss conspiracies and stability\, the r
 ole of political and commuting zones\, and multivariate non-local cultural
  regions.
LOCATION:Queen's Building\, Emmanuel College
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