The Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP) is a research and preservation initiative housed at North Carolina State University. SLAAP was created by Tyler Kendall, in 2005, as a collaboration between the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP, now the Language and Life Project, LLP) and the North Carolina State University Libraries. (For more information about the LLP see https://languageandlife.org/.) For the first period of SLAAP's existence, the server was housed in and hosted by the NCSU Libraries. Eventually, SLAAP moved to NCSU's College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where it continues to reside.

In brief, SLAAP has two core goals: (1) to preserve and enhance the usability of the sociolinguistic recordings of the LLP and other sociolinguists through the digitization and web-based delivery of audio recordings; and (2) to enable and explore new computer-enhanced techniques for sociolinguistic analysis.

SLAAP has existed for two decades as an active language archive and linguistic resource. Much of SLAAP's development occurred in its first few years, and much of its "exploration" of new techniques and data models (goal 2, above) was done in these early years (see Kendall's dissertation and publications like his 2013 book for discussions of some of these explorations). However, the archive has continued to grow throughout its existence. SLAAP is one of the largest and longest running archives for sociolinguistic recordings (see the What is in the SLAAP archive? section).

(SLAAP began its life as the North Carolina Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (NCSLAAP). To better reflect SLAAP's broad focus NC was dropped from its name in its early years, but you may occasionally see reference to NCSLAAP, especially in SLAAP's URLs.

The archive continues to grow over time. It currently contains (as of July 2024)

• over 5,000 interviews;
• over 8,200 audio files;
• over 4,100 hours of audio!;
  
  
• over 270 hours of transcribed audio;
• over 2.7 million words of orthographically transcribed speech, accurately time-stamped and linked to the audio

The collection contains data from many sociolinguistic researchers, including Walt Wolfram, Ron Butters, Erik Thomas, Natalie Schilling, and Kirk Hazen. It also houses the recordings underlying the Corpus of Regional African American Language.

Many of the collections housed in SLAAP are indexed in the language resource catalog maintained by OLAC, and this is the best source for a list of collections available in SLAAP. Please see SLAAP's entries in the OLAC catalog. You may also want to view SLAAP's main entry at OLAC.

Good question: You're right to note that the 273.3 hours of transcribed audio is only a tiny portion (only 6.6%!) of the audio collection. Why haven't we transcribed more? Transcripts in SLAAP are meticulously made by hand, using Praat to obtain highly accurate timestamps for each utterance by each speaker (cf. Kendall 2006-2007, Kendall 2007a). Transcripts continue to be added to SLAAP over time, but the rate of the addition of new audio files outpaces the addition of new transcripts.

Many of SLAAP's features are designed to make it easier to work with and analyze audio recordings without transcription. User-generated time-aligned annotations, for example, allow users to better search and catalogue the audio. The variable extraction and coding features allow users to time-align sociolinguistic variables for more reliable and repeatable analysis.

Some of the interviews in SLAAP have legacy transcripts in plain-text (or MS Word) formats. Many of these are available to SLAAP users, as files associated with their source recordings in SLAAP, but these transcripts are not included towards the reported 273.3 hours of transcibed audio.

Access to the SLAAP software and archive is password protected. Bona fide researchers can ask for and receive access to portions of the collection, dependent on the specific needs of the researcher and the human subjects permissions for the requested materials. Students and educators can also be granted access to collections, depending on the collection. If you are interested in accessing data in SLAAP, please contact the lead researcher associated with the specific data. If you are unsure who to contact, please feel free to reach out to Tyler Kendall.

We intend for SLAAP to be available to house and analyze non-LLP recordings. If you would like to add your materials to the SLAAP archive, especially to make your materials available to other researchers, please let us know! (SLAAP's access control features allow fine-grained access control over the availability of the archive's resources.)

Tyler Kendall has written some articles about the project. For general information about SLAAP, Kendall's short 2007 PWPL article is a recommended source (and citation) for information about SLAAP:

The SLAAP User Guide also provides a lot of information about SLAAP. A more general paper related to SLAAP is:

For more papers written about SLAAP or as a result of SLAAP, see the papers page. You are also welcome to email Tyler - at tsk [at] uoregon.edu - if you have specific questions about the project.

The old webpages about SLAAP and about its features are pretty out of date and much of the information on them is no longer accurate. Nonethless, for historical reasons they are still available here:

• about the project
• software features