We use various technologies for e-learning, some provided by the Freie Universität computing services, some by outside providers. See Software: E-Learning for more details.

R is a statistical programming language that is used extensively in linguistics and many other scientific and economic fields. It is open source, which means free of cost, as opposed to proprietary programs like SPSS, Matlab, or Microsoft Excel. Open source also means that there is a wealth of excellent extension packages made by the community, allowing you to run almost any sort of analysis.

Rstudio is an IDE (integrated development environment) for R. It comes with a text editor, custom shortcuts, code checker and linter (it shows you where you have errors in your code), a spreadsheet like data viewer, terminal, filebrowser and a lot more. It is highly recommended for beginners since it makes data analysis in R much more user-friendly.

Download and installation:

• R base
• Rstudio (requires R base)

R packages specifically made for linguistic analysis include:

• zipfR — Modelling productivity, vocabulary growth curves
• collostructions — collexeme, distinctive ollexeme, and co-varying collexeme Analysis

It is also becoming more and more common for researchers to publish individual data sets, scripts or entire analyses on their websites, or platforms like Github.

There are several text books on how to use R in linguistics:

• Baayen (2008), Analyzing Linguistic Data. A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge University Press.
• Levshina, Natalia. (2015). How to do linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis. John Benjamins.
• Gries, Stefan Th. (2013). Statistics for Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. Walter de Gruyter.

Rmarkdown is a simple markup language (similar to html, or LaTeX) that offers an easy way to write properly formatted academic articles, with a simple interface for bibliography software (e.g. bibtex), and an an easy-to-learn syntax. For individual articles, essays, term papers, it is more reliable and efficient than common word processors and easier, less complex than LaTeX. It is flexible and offers you to easily make any document type, including slide presentations or html webpages.

Its biggest strength, however, is its capability to easily embed and run R code, which allows you to make flexible and easily reproducible data analyses. If set up correctly, your tables, graphs and figures are updated at compilation time, which can save you hours of tracking down changes. The packages Rmarkdown and Knitr are tightly integrated into Rstudio.

The templates offered by Rstudio are enough for most applications. If you need more fine-grained control, however, and if you work on book-sized projects, LaTeX might be the better choice unless you have in-depth knowledge of R and pandoc. You can actually run arbitrary LaTeX code within Rmarkdown.

See Rmarkdown: A Definitve Guide

vim is a terminal-based text editor that is available on most Linux distributions and on macOS and can be installed on Windows. You can also access it by signing in to your ZEDAT user account on the login server and typing vim. We use vim in many of our instructions for collecting, annotating and compiling linguistic corpora, so you may want to have some basic familiarity with it.

Access:

• Linux: Preinstalled in most distributions
• macOS: Preinstalled
• Windows: Download (Free), Link: https://www.vim.org/download.php

• Nvim-R: Integration with R (requires Neovim)
• vimling: Intuitive bindings for IPA characters and other international characters
• phonetics.vim: transcription and pronunciation for word under cursor (from the Oxford English Learners Dictionary, RP and GA)

BBEdit is a powerful text editor for macOS, that allows you to import and export files in various text encodings and has a powerful regex and text manipulation functionality. It can also be configured to work with a range of perl scripts that we supply for creating corpora.

Access: Download for macOS (Basic version is free)

Download: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

Audacity is a multi-track audio editor that allows you to record sound or import existing sound files, edit them in various ways and and export a range of audio file formats, including .wav and .mpg.

Access: Download for Linux, macOS and Windows (Free)

Link: https://www.audacityteam.org/

Bibtex is minimalist, cross-platform, and open source. It works great with LaTeX and Rmarkdown documents. However, it is so popular that people have integrated it into almost any word processing software (e.g. Bibtex4word). It works by setting up a plain text file with every entry consisting of keys (identifiers for in-text citations) and publication data. Almost all libraries, publishers, literature search engines (Google Scholar, Jstor), etc, offer bibtex code for easy copy and paste for each book or article.

Example entry:

  @book{langacker99,
  title        = {Grammar and conceptualization},
  author       = {Langacker, Ronald W},
  location     = {Berlin},
  year         = {1999},
  publisher    = {Mouton de Gruyter}
  }
  

Example reference in Latex: \textcite{langacker99}; in Rmarkdown or Pandoc: [@langacker99]. The citation and bibliography styles are specified in the respective preambles or options.

A common style within linguistics is the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics.

You for use with LaTeX and Rmarkdown, you can find .csl files on Github e.g. here

see separate page