Joshua Wilson Black

Philosophy | Linguistics | Digital Humanities

Background image: MS page from Charles Sanders Peirce's "Issues of Pragmaticism" (source)

Joshua Wilson Black

Post Doctoral Fellow

New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour | Te Kahui Roro Reo

University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

I’m Joshua Wilson Black, a Post Doctoral Fellow at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour | Te Kahui Roro Reo at the University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha. My research interests span philosophy, linguistics, data science, and digital humanities. In all these fields, I seek insight into sign use, understood broadly, and how it fits in to our picture of the wider world.

My current primary research interest is in sociophonetics, where I investigate the dynamics of vowel spaces over time and within conversations and the early onset of vernacular reorganisation using large-scale corpus analysis.

Interests

Analysis of Text and Audio Corpora
Clustering and Classification
History of Philosophy (esp. Charles Sanders Peirce and the Pragmatist Tradition)
Language Change

Education

Master of Applied Data Science, 2021

University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha
PhD in Philosophy, 2017

University of Sheffield
MA in Philosophy, 2013

University of Waikato | Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato
BSc(Hons) in Mathematics and Philosophy, 2012

University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha
BA in Philosophy and BSc in Mathematics, 2011

University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

Experience

Post Doctoral Fellow

New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour | Te Kahui Roro Reo
University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

Feb 2021 – Present Christchurch, New Zealand | Ōtautahi, Aotearoa

Research on the Marsden funded projects:

Towards and improved theory of language change, and
Understanding the onset of vernacular reorganisation.

Key technologies and methods used include:

LaBB-CAT, the NZILBB corpus analysis tool,
Principal Component Analysis and Generalised Additive (Mixed) Models, and
R and the tidyverse package collection.

Lead Research Assistant

UC Arts Digital Lab
University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

Jun 2020 – Feb 2021 Christchurch, New Zealand | Ōtautahi, Aotearoa

Interviews and data processing for the UC QuakeBox: Take 2 project.

Graduate Teaching Fellow

Department of Philosophy
University of Sheffield

Feb 2014 – Aug 2018 Sheffield, United Kingdom

Teaching across a wide range of philosophy modules. Course design and lecturing for:

Reason and Argument, an introductory module on informal logic, and
Mathematical Skills for Arts and Humanities.

Posts

New Publication: Creating Specialised Corpora from Digitized Historical Newspaper Archives

One of the promises of digital humanities for the ‘historical sciences’ is that we’ll be able to, in Tim Hitchcock’s words, shift from ‘piles of books’ to ‘maps of meaning’. That is, we’ll be able to produce high level representations of phenomena across large collections of text.

Last updated on Jan 26, 2023 4 min read

New Publication: Creating Specialised Corpora from Digitized Historical Newspaper Archives

Model Check and Significance Testing for Vowel Space GAMMs

Table of Contents Introduction Model Fit (Again) Using gam.check Significance Testing P-Values for By-Factor Smooths from the Model Summary Plotting Significance of By-Factor Smooths in Vowel Space P-Values for Difference Smooths Pointwise Significance of Difference Smooths Conclusion Introduction In a previous post, I set out a workflow for fitting and visualising generalised additive mixed models for F1 and F2 of a series of vowels and using these to visualise change over an entire vowel space.

Last updated on Aug 30, 2022 29 min read

Model Check and Significance Testing for Vowel Space GAMMs

Organising Shareable R Projects

There is plenty of advice out there for organising projects using R and RStudio. This post gathers together the advice I’ve found useful, especially with respect to sharing code and data between researchers. I run through directory stucture, the use of R project files, and the here package.

Last updated on Aug 1, 2022 8 min read

A 3D PCA Visualisation with Plotly

Attempts to produce an illustrative example of PCA using formant data and Plotly via R.

Last updated on Jul 19, 2022 7 min read

Visualising Vowel Space Change with GAMs

This tutorial is now available at LingMethodsHub. If you use the tutorial, please cite the version there. Introduction Multiple recent projects at NZILBB have used Generalised Mixed Models (GAMMs) to investigate changes in vowel spaces both across multiples speakers and within single speakers.

Last updated on Jun 29, 2022 17 min read

Visualising Vowel Space Change with GAMs

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Publications

Joshua Wilson Black (2022). Peirce on Metaphysics and Common Sense Belief: A Challenge to Hookway’s Account. Upcoming volume in honour of Christopher Hookway.

PDF

Joshua Wilson Black, Jennifer Hay, Lynn Clark, James Brand (2022). The Overlooked Effect of Amplitude on Within-Speaker Vowel Variation. Under review.

Joshua Wilson Black (2022). Creating Specialised Corpora from Digitised Historical Newspaper Archives. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Cite Paper OSF

Joshua Wilson Black, James Brand, Jennifer Hay, Lynn Clark (2022). Using Principal Component Analysis to Explore Co-Variation of Vowels. Language and Linguistics Compass.

Cite Paper GitHub DOI

Catherine Legg, Joshua Black (2020). What is Intelligence For? A Peircean Pragmatist Response to the Knowing-How, Knowing-That Debate. Erkenntnis.

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