LING-102: Final Field Project Report
Submission: Due at noon on Sunday, August 5. Please
email me your report in either Word or PDF, and attach your spreadsheet(s)
as well in case I need to check something. Also please bring me a hardcopy
of your report to class on Monday 8/6. If you submit a co-authored report
(again, joint work is encouraged), I just need one copy with both of your
names on it.
Approximate length: 3-5 pages of text (assuming
single-spacing) - but I'm much more interested in quality than quantity. As
long as you're reasonably thorough there's no need to worry about length.
General guidelines: This report is your chance to apply and
demonstrate what you have learned about studying linguistic variation,
focusing on Philadelphia short-a in particular. Refer to the preliminary report instructions for guidelines on
data clean-up and reporting your results. A few additional recommendations
for this version:
- Include a brief introduction that states which questions you
investigated and why. There's no need for a general description of the
study methodology or of Philadelphia short-a; you can assume that I'm familiar with this.
- Break your main text up into sections where appropriate.
- Incorporate tables and graphs in the text itself, instead of
referring to a separate file or appendix. Make sure you report n's along
with your frequencies (a good rule of thumb, so that anyone who wants to
check your results can recover all the information they need).
- Use chi-square and t-tests if appropriate to determine the
likelihood that your observations were due to chance.
- You don't need to describe all the steps you went through in Excel to
arrive at your results, unless you're particularly worried that you might
have made an error.
- Make a note of any shortcomings in the data that prevented you from
pursuing a particular question further, but don't spend too long dwelling
on overall weaknesses (again, you can assume that I'm already aware of
them).
- Include a conclusion that briefly summarizes your results and
their implications, pointing out areas where further investigation would be
useful.
Evaluation: I will grade your reports based on:
- your appropriate selection of questions to investigate (are they suitable
for this particular data set, considering the amount of data we have and
the particular methods we used? Do you understand the typical Philadelphia
short-a pattern and recognize potential areas of variation and change?)
- your thoughtfulness in organizing and analyzing the data (making necessary
corrections, adding/collapsing categories, subsorting
to isolate linguistic/demographic categories)
- your accurate and appropriate use of the analytical tools covered in
class (calculating and comparing frequencies, applying statistical tests
where appropriate to measure significance)
- the clarity of your written presentation - including your appropriate
use of tables and graphs
- your contributions to the data set itself
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