I was able to get space to load by changing the function to point to a manually downloaded copy:
spacy_en = spacy.load(’~/courses/fastai2/courses/dl1/data/aclImdb/en_core_web_md-2.0.0’
but now I’m getting an error because it’s trying to read the data in ascii, but that’s not what I’ve downloaded. I’m looking for a way to convert it over to UTF, any thoughts appreciated 
UnicodeDecodeError Traceback (most recent call last)
in ()
1 FILES = dict(train=TRN_PATH, validation=VAL_PATH, test=VAL_PATH)
----> 2 md = LanguageModelData(PATH, TEXT, **FILES, bs=bs, bptt=bptt, min_freq=10)
~/courses/fastai2/courses/dl1/fastai/nlp.py in init(self, path, field, train, validation, test, bs, bptt, **kwargs)
193 self.trn_ds,self.val_ds,self.test_ds = ConcatTextDataset.splits(
194 path, text_field=field, train=train, validation=validation, test=test)
–> 195 field.build_vocab(self.trn_ds, **kwargs)
196 self.pad_idx = field.vocab.stoi[field.pad_token]
197 self.nt = len(field.vocab)
/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/torchtext/data/dataset.py in splits(cls, path, root, train, validation, test, **kwargs)
67 path = cls.download(root)
68 train_data = None if train is None else cls(
—> 69 os.path.join(path, train), **kwargs)
70 val_data = None if validation is None else cls(
71 os.path.join(path, validation), **kwargs)
~/courses/fastai2/courses/dl1/fastai/nlp.py in init(self, path, text_field, newline_eos, **kwargs)
182 for p in paths:
183 for line in open§: text += text_field.preprocess(line)
–> 184 if newline_eos: text.append(’’)
185
186 examples = [torchtext.data.Example.fromlist([text], fields)]
/usr/lib/python3.6/encodings/ascii.py in decode(self, input, final)
24 class IncrementalDecoder(codecs.IncrementalDecoder):
25 def decode(self, input, final=False):
—> 26 return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
27
28 class StreamWriter(Codec,codecs.StreamWriter):
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xc3 in position 3680: ordinal not in range(128)