Week 9: Continued Processing (or, “So Much Waiting…”)

Hello, all! Last week, I mentioned I’d be running FastTrack on the corpus to measure the normal vowels. I’ve been doing this in batches, to make sure that if anything went wrong in the middle and I had to restart, I wouldn’t lose too much progress by having to rerun it. This turned out to be useful when, as I predicted, something went wrong in one of the batches and I had to restart. 

It seemed that FastTrack was failing to process one of the files, although I don’t quite understand the error produced yet. I took that file out and reran the rest of the batch, and I plan to discuss this at my next meeting with Dr. Newman. 

Overall, the process is going very slowly, so I might need to change my plans in order to finish in time to use the findings for my project. I could switch to just measuring the pertinent vowels for my work with rhoticity, and leave out the rest of the vowels that I don’t need, or only process some of the files, just gathering enough data to establish the vowel baselines I’m looking for. Either way, I’ll have to consider how long the new option would take and how long I expect the rest of the work to take, compared to the time I have. Once again, I’ll talk about it with Dr. Newman and make a plan by next week.