Week 10: Final Processing (or, “Team Work Makes the Dream Work”)

Hello, all! This week, I made plans for everything going forward. In last week’s post, I mentioned that I had to figure out how to finish running Fast Track on everything in time; this week, I met some people who can help. 

Me and Dr. Newman aren’t the only ones using the CoNYCE, but until this week we hadn’t all met each other. In total, there are four others: one college student, who has been working with Dr. Newman for some years already on a separate project studying vowels, and three high schoolers like me, who just joined recently to learn more about linguistics and help out however they can. 

The plan we came up with is to distribute the remaining files that need to be processed among the high schoolers, and then have them run Fast Track on their own computers. Once everyone finishes processing their sections, I can combine all of the outputs. Splitting up the work like this will hopefully allow us to go four times as fast, and get the last 150 files done by the end of this week. Once this is done, not only will I have more accurate data to use in my project for measuring “r”s, but this data will also be available for other people to do their own research with. 

In addition to all this, the official end of Senior Projects is approaching, so over the next week-and-a-half I’ll be working on my final presentation and my deliverable, which is a research paper documenting my work.