01-01-2024

E 321L American English

In Spring 2024 I'll be teaching E 321L/LIN 321L American English. Students should be sure to obtain a hardcopy of the textbook:

Other editions are not appropriate for this course.

01-01-2024

E 316N/C L 315 Masterworks of Literature

My upcoming E 316N/C L 315 will use two printed texts and plenty of electronic texts. The printed ones are

Other editions are not appropriate for this course.

11-29-2023

Sentiment in Shakespeare

In 2020 I was getting accustomed to digital text analysis in R (for much of it, guided by Julia Silge) when my friend and colleague Doug Bruster asked me if I could demo some of the methods for his honors Shakespeare course. So I put together a demo on analyzing The Taming of the Shrew in a distill website. - The work recently turned into an assignment for E 310D Intro to Digital Studies (see here).

02-27-2023

Portrait on "Into the COLAverse"

The new podcast "Into the COLAverse", hosted by Frederick Aldama, just published their latest faculty portrait, with me as guest. Listen to it here


03-16-2022

Slides: Lexical Diversity Measures

A slide presentation for my class Digital Text Analysis, illustrating different lexical diversity statistics that are implemented in {quanteda.textstats}. More...

02-25-2022

Lecture "Why We Need Diaspora Sociolinguistics" (UWI Mona, Jamaica)

This invited lecture was delivered live via Zoom and YouTube. More...

10-26-2021

Digital Text Analysis (Spring 2022)

This will be a graduate course focused on the use of R to analyze textual data, with use cases from a variety of academic disciplines. No prior knowledge of R or statistics required. More...

10-26-2021

NWAV 49 in Austin

The 49th meeting of the sociolinguistic conference "New Ways of Analyzing Variation", NWAV 49, has just finished. I chaired the organizing committee. There is a lot of information about the conference at its website, www.nwav49.org. And the history of the conference is discussed here

04-26-2021

Plotting DARLA-Vowels with Tableau

A new video tutorial for instructors who are looking for an easier way to have students analyze vowel data. 

01-21-2021

Inaugural Speeches by Texan Presidents

We ran some computational analyses on the inaugural speeches of US Presidents from Texas. And then we compared them to Joe Biden's inaugural speech from January 20th, 2021. Check out a summary of the findings here.

George W. Bush's second inaugural speech. (Wikimedia Commons)

01-03-2021

Handbook of English Linguistics (second edition)

The Handbook of English Linguistics (2nd edition, Wiley), which I coedited, is now shipping. Here it is at the publisher's website:

https://bit.ly/hoel-e2

The editing process for the new edition took about three years. Working with these fantastic colleagues has been a truly enriching experience! 

11-05-2020

The fading of WHOM

One project that started with a graduate course in 2017 is the tracking of the increasingly antique relativizer whom over time, using COHA. With the graduate students I produced exploratory statistics. In collaboration with Axel Bohmann, I am now taking a highly multivariate look at the ways in which the receding of WHOM progresses through different genre categories (again, looking at COHA). See our progress report.

08-10-2020

Digital Studies at UT Austin

As part of the growing digital studies ecosystem at UT Austin I direct the Digital Studies Graduate Portfolio. Here is the updated info website about the program: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/ds/graduate/ds-portfolio/

Digital Studies at UT Austin

05-10-2020

Texas English on the radio

Since the beginning of 2019 I have been a regular guest on the Texas Standard, KUT's weekday news magazine. Together with host David Brown I listen to the voices of well-known Texans and discuss their linguistic style. A collection of all the episodes that have aired so far is available at the link below.

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/categories/texan-translation/