The LSA Summer Institute is almost over and it has been a lot of fun so far. I didn’t get to see nearly as many talks and classes as I had hoped to, but instead there were tons of interesting conversations, new ideas, and just nice moments hanging out in the sun.
Brief update: It couldn’t have been different — I missed my flight. That happens every time I try to leave the Bay area. I am so used to it, I am not even trying to be on time anymore 
. Ah well, it gives me a chance to enjoy a cappuccino in my favorite SF Cafe (Ritual Roasters) and even to attend Dan’s party (yippie!). Oh, and to upload some random pictures from the class room. Yeah, pretty dark I know. If you have better pictures — can you send them to me and I upload them? Also, here are some pics from our office hours at Caffee Strada (thanks to Judith and Alex for a great job!):
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- Random class room shot (2)
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- Random class room shot
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- Late night “office hours” at Jupiter’s
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- Michi smiling with TGrep2 at his command (almost!)
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- Judith and Alex working hard to spread the word of Switchboard
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- Judith (at hour 2 of 6)
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- hmm, probably at Jupiter’s again
LSA125-ers — thanks for an enjoyable class, for all the questions, and I hope you keep enjoying your projects (or, if nothing else, now know for certain that you really really never want to work with corpora . Send us an update about your papers as they progress.
To everyone else out there: If you’re interested in the use of syntactic corpora to investigate language production, you may find our LSA125 class webpage useful (see especially the links and information on the corpus pages, but also the slides). If you use material from this page, please let us know. Thanks to Judith, we now have a nicely documented version of the TGrep2 Database Tools, which we have dubbed TDTlite. Alex and Judith have also prepared example projects. TDTlite allows you to combine the output of TGrep2 searchers on syntactic corpora into a nice tab-delimited database that can be importated into R, Excel, or the stats program of your choice. While it doesn’t give you the full flexibility of scripting things yourself, it makes it considerably easier to start your own corpus-based project. We’re in the progress of polishing things up for distribution (thanks to all the brave members of our class who helped us to understand which parts still need further improvement!). So, if something like that might be of interest to you, let us know whether you would like further information. We hope to have a beta release by the end of August.
Dear Florian,
It was a pleasure meeting you. Good luck and keep up the good work.
Sincerely
Matt Rispoli
Thanks Matt =)