Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetatched rabbit-part!” We undergo this experience pratically every time we learn a word, and yet we still manage to do it.
Inspired by the famous Gavagai thought experiment, these items feature a running rabbit and the caption “lo, an undetached rabbit-part!” in a woodblock-engraving-crossed-with-vaporwave style in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black/white on shirts, scarves, and more!
“More people have been to Russia than I have” is a sentence that at first seems fine, but then gets weirder and weirder the more you read it. Inspired by these Escher sentences, we’ve made self-referential shirts saying “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have” (also available on tote bags, mugs, and hats, with the appropriate tweaks in wording), so you can wear them in old-time typewriter font and see who does a double take.
We’ve made a design that simply says “Ask me about linguistics” in a style that looks like a classic “Hello, my name is…” sticker, and you can put it on stickers and buttons and shirts and assorted other portable items for when you want to skip the small talk and go right to a topic you’re excited about.
ALT
Lingthusiasm merch generally
If you’re looking for subtle-to-obvious ways to signal that you’re a linguist or linguistics fan in public, gift ideas for the linguistics enthusiast in your life (or handy links to forward to people who might be interested in getting you a gift sometime), we also have many previous items of Lingthusiasm merch!
We love to see your photos of Lingthusiasm merch or any diy linguistics crafts projects you might make! Feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media or share in the #merch-crafts-objects channel in the Lingthusiasm Discord.
Stay lingthusiastic!
A cute classic Gavagai illustration has been on my Lingthusiasm merch wish list for years now. So excited that 2024 is the year we made this one happen.
And yes, I also have an “ask me about linguistics” button badge for my lanyard at work.
The publication of Himalayan Linguistics issue 23(1) marks 20 years of the journal. To celebrate this milestone, the current team of editors, including myself, teamed up with two key former editors to write a special editorial about the history of the journal. Below are some excerpts from this history, as well as the article list for HL23(1) and a newly published Archives piece.
In early 2004, the first issue of Himalayan Linguistics was published. This first issue contained a single article: “An Analysis of Syntax and Prosody Interactions in a Dolakhā Newar: Rendition of The Mahābhārata”, by Carol Genetti and Keith Slater. In 2024, with the publication of Issue 23.1, Himalayan Linguistics celebrates twenty years of publishing fee-free Open Access research scholarship on the languages of the Himalayas. In these twenty years, Himalayan Linguistics has published almost 200 pieces of scholarship, all freely available online. In this special introductory article, we chart the history of the journal and look to its future.
In its twenty years of publication, Himalayan Linguistics has published 144 original research articles, 18 review articles, and 14 Archive and Field Reports. The Archive publications include grammars, dictionaries, text collections and extended descriptive works.
Himalayan Linguistics is well-placed to continue into the next twenty years. Indeed, the need for accessible online journals, which do not gatekeep with article processing charges, is even greater. The rise of digital-first research publication has seen an even contraction and concentration in the publishing market, which is now predominantly an oligopoly of a few giant commercial publishers (Larivière et al. 2015). This landscape creates a barrier, particularly for scholars who cannot afford processing fees.
Himalayan Linguistics, Volume 23, Issue 1, 2024
Editorial: Twenty years of Himalayan Linguistics Lauren Gawne, Gregory Anderson, You-Jing Lin, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, Carol Genetti,
Spoken and sung vowels produced by bilingual Nepali speakers: A brief comparison Arnav Darnal,
A corpus-based study of cassifiers and measure words in Khortha Netra P. Paudyal
The grammar and meaning of atemporal complement clauses in Assamese: A cognitive linguistics approach Bisalakshi Sawarni, Gautam K. Borah
Possessive prefixes in Proto-Kusunda Augie Spendley
Expressing inner sensations in Denjongke: A contrast with the general Tibetic pattern Juha Sakari Yliniemi
New in Archives and Field Reports
Facts and attitudes: on the so-called ‘factual’ markers of the modern Tibetic languages [HL ARCHIVE 14] Bettina Zeisler
Over the last couple of years I’ve had a bit of a running thing with emblem gestures - those gestures that have a fixed meaning and a fixed form for a particular group. I’ve done posts about air quote gestures, worked on emoji proposals for head nods and shakes, and written a journal article about the emblem gestures from The Hunger Games and Star Trek.
All of this work is been happening because I’ve been working with Kensy Cooperrider on a major review of the emblem literature, which is now published in Glossa. I started working on this article in the first year after returning to work when my first child was born, so it’s fitting that it’s finishing up pretty much four years later when my second child is a similar age. Kensy also became a parent while we were writing this paper. It’s been a slow and steady approach with this project!
This paper aims to summarise what make emblems, especially what makes them so interesting, and how they relate to spoken language, signed language, other gesture categories and other phenomena. We also surveyed the known literature of emblems across the world’s languages, noting that we need to do a lot better at documenting the world’s diversity of emblems. We also lay out the kinds of questions we should be asking about emblems, and the exciting cross-disciplinary potential for work in this area.
I really enjoyed starting a new topic deep dive. I especially appreciated that Kensy agreed to join me on this adventure. I’ve long admired his writing, both academic publications and his excellent work for general audiences across a variety of publications. His podcast Many Minds is also great.
Definitely more from me on the topic of emblems in the future.
Abstract
Emblems—the thumbs up, the head shake, the peace sign, the shhh—are communicative gestures that have a conventional form and conventional meaning within a particular community. This makes them more “word-like” than other gestures and gives them a distinctive position at the interface between language and gesture. Here we provide an overview of emblems as a recurring feature of the human communicative toolkit. We first discuss the major defining features of these gestures, and their points of commonality and difference with neighbouring communicative phenomena. Next, we review efforts to document emblems around the world. Our survey highlights the patchiness of global coverage, as well as strengths and limitations of approaches used to date. Finally, we consider a handful of open questions about emblems, including how they mean, how they are learned, and why they exist in the first place. Addressing these questions will require collaboration among linguists, lexicographers, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others. It will also deepen our understanding of human semiotic systems and how they interface with each other.
Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones
There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone’s voice, it’s useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they’re wearing and who they’re talking with.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who’s a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their voices and other variables like clothing, and later collaborating with one of their research participants to reflect on how it feels to have your personal voice and gender expression plotted on a chart. We also talk about linguistic geography, Canadian and New Zealand Englishes, and the secret plurality of R sounds in English and how you can figure out which one you have by poking yourself (gently!) with a toothpick.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three of our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups: spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns! We talk about William Spooner, the Oxford prof from the 1800s that many spoonerisms are (falsely) attributed to, Lauren’s very Australian 90s picture book of spoonerisms, the Scottish song “The Bonny Earl of Moray” which gave rise to the term mondegreen, why there are so many more mondegreens in older pop songs and folk songs than there are now, and how eggcorn is a double eggcorn (a mis-parsing of acorn, which itself is an eggcorn of oak-corn for akern).
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds about your favourite linguistic mixups.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
I was delighted to get the chance to review a new book from Laura Wagner & Cecile McKee all about doing lingcomm through hands-on demos and conversations at museums, science fairs and other public events. There’s a lot in the book for anyone who wants to start or refine the way they share linguistics with different audiences, particularly those that do face-to-face interactive work.
Communicating about linguistics to non-specialist audiences (lingcomm) is a specialist skill set in its own right. Equipping more linguists with these skills is vital if linguistics is going to stake a claim for its relevance to people’s lives as more than a passing curiosity. Until now, this skill set had to be learned mostly through emulation of existing practitioners, online resources and informal networks. Thankfully, Laura Wagner (Ohio State University) and Cecile McKee (University of Arizona) have distilled their extensive experience running lingcomm activities and events into a clear and practical book. How to Talk Language Science with Everyone (Cambridge University Press) illustrates the best of lingcomm practice; it is informed by linguistic research as well as insights from related fields, including psychology, education and anthropology. It also illustrates the best of the lingcomm community more broadly; it is accessible to those new to the practice, encouraging in tone, and passionate about introducing more people to how great linguistics is (a fact taken as given in this book).
The closing worksheets of each chapter are a sequence of activities that allow the reader to work towards what the authors call a ‘doable demo’, a well-planned hands-on demo that engages an intended audience in your topic of interest. While the activities in the early chapters are not particularly linked to the chapter topic, as the book builds the activities allow the reader to put the lessons of the chapter to work designing and refining a hands-on demo. The book can make a good classroom resource for anyone lucky enough to be able to run a lingcomm/scicomm subject, but the clear structure of the book means that it can be put to great use in the hands of an individual with time to work through the activities. It would be great to see more people working on short, engaging hands-on demos that capture people’s linguistic imagination (and, as the authors say in the book, sharing them!). Alongside initiatives like 3 Minute Thesis and 5 Minute Linguist, a hands-on demo can be an important part of a linguist’s toolkit for communicating with a range of audiences outside of academia. This book is perfect for you to share with your engaged graduate students or highly-enthusiastic undergraduates.
Thanks to Language for arranging for the review copy!
Wagner, Laura & Cecile McKee. 2023. How to Talk Language Science with Everybody. Cambridge University Press. [Review in Language]
The 2024 LingComm Grants awarded six $500 (USD) grants, thanks to the support of Lingthusiasm, Rob Monarch, Wordnik, Claire Bowern, and Kirby Conrod and friends. Some of these projects are already producing content for you to enjoy right now!
Marvin Nauendorff, Anthony Burger, Anna Sulaiman, Rebecca Hall, Alice Pol, Perla Camacho-Cedillo, Aline Vitaly, Yuka Kawasaki, Linguaphile Language Magazine
Grants were judged by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch and also included a group mentoring meeting for advice and support. The 2024 LingComm Grants received 40 applications.
Lingthusiasm Episode 92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode
Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making “brunch” from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing “handbag” being pronounced more like “hambag”.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about smooshing words together. We talk about the history of portmanteau words like motel and chortle, the poem Jabberwocky, and why some portmanteaus, like Kenergy from Ken + energy, sound really satisfying, while others (wonut??) just don’t catch on at all. We also talk about words becoming more efficient to produce over time, like how a path can be gradually created through many people choosing the same route through a field, such as “going to” becoming “gonna” or the historical forms of ASL “remember” and French “aujourd'hui”.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about secret codes and the word games we create based on them!! We talk about using alternate symbols to encode messages like in semaphore, Morse code, as well as repurposing existing symbols like the Caesar cipher, ROT13, and cryptoquote puzzles. We also talk about cryptic crosswords, which aren’t technically a kind of cryptography but were used to recruit codebreakers for Bletchley Park in World War II, as well as Navajo, Choctaw, and other Native American code talkers who used their language skills to transmit messages in both world wars that were much harder to crack than a mere cipher.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
In Thinking With Your Hands, Susan Goldin-Meadow meets the challenge of summarising a lifetime of research for a non-specialist audience. Since the early 1970s Goldin-Meadow has been researching the role of gesture in thinking, communicating and learning. This book captures her passion for this work, and the enthusiasm for collaboration that has resulted in the Goldin-Meadow lab being a powerhouse of Gesture Studies scholarship over the last three decades. There are some black line images throughout the book that illustrate some key gestural moments. I was delighted to read a physical review copy from the publisher.
Goldin-Meadow’s work spans a range of topics in child language acquisition, the emergence of homesign and signed languages, and the use of gesture in educational contexts. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, “Thinking with our hands”, introduces the ways that gesture provides a more expansive understanding of language and what we communicate. In this book, as in her research, Goldin-Meadow focuses on the gestures we use alongside speech. These gestures can provide visual information alongside the structured linguistic content of spoken or signed languages. Sometimes that information is not found in the linguistic content and instead offers a different perspective on the thought processes of the person using gesture, other times, gesturing appears to not only show, but help, the thinking process.
The second section, “Speaking with our hands”, is built around Goldin-Meadow’s expertise in children’s communication, particularly in contexts without spoken language. This includes discussion of homesign, where a deaf child is raised in a hearing household without signed language and develops a way of communicating with their family. These homesign systems are more than gesture, but less structured than a language, although as Goldin-Meadow’s work has shown, it’s the child driving the structure, not their caregivers. Goldin-Meadow is exceedingly diplomatic about the choices made by parents in these contexts, but at least makes it clear how the oralism approach does not benefit children. We also get to read about the birth of signed languages in contexts like Nicuagua, where the first school for deaf children was set up in the 1980s. In a context of support and input, children are able to collaboratively build a full language, often drawing on local gestures as one of their resources.
The third section, “Why you should care about hands”, draws on insights from the research introduced in earlier chapters to make a case for gesture being relevant to parents, clinicians and teachers. The final chapter “what if gesture were considered as important as language?” is an opportunity that Goldin-Meadow uses for a vision for the use of the many remarkable insight from her work and that of collaborators and colleagues.
Although this book draws mostly on research conducted by her own lab, or by people from her lab who have gone on to become leaders in the field in their own right, the book still draws on research from others across the field as well. It’s clear that Goldin-Meadow is demonstrating the ways she’s honed the message about her work, and its wider relevance, for a general audience. For someone with a passing familiarity with work from the Goldin-Meadow lab, there’s a great deal of charm in learning the stories behind some iconic pieces of research. Goldin-Meadow is very happy to let us know that had shown students some classic gesture mismatch footage in her classes for years before Brecky Church coded the data and noted that the mismatches preceded a developmental advance. Goldin-Meadow is exceedingly charming in her enthusiasm for name-checking her junior collaborators and students, as well as their students (who she gleefully points out are her academic grandchildren).
In Thinking with your Hands Goldin-Meadow’s expertise and depths of enthusiasm are exceedingly evident, but so is her commitment to finding ways to share her work with people beyond psychology and Gesture Studies. This has become one of my go-to recommendations for Gesture Studies scicomm.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, Thinking With Your Hands (Basic Books, 2023)
Lingthusiasm Episode 91: Scoping out the scope of scope
When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you’d probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle…even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of “everything”. That’s because words like “everything” and “all” really mean something more like “everything typical in this situation”. Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope. We talk about how humour often relies on scope ambiguity, such as a cake with “Happy Birthday in red text” written on it (quotation scope ambiguity) and the viral bench plaque “In Memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (negation scope ambiguity). We also talk about how linguists collect fun examples of ambiguity going about their everyday lives, how gesture and intonation allow us to disambiguate most of the time, and using several scopes in one sentence for double plus ambiguity fun.
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the forms that our thoughts take inside our heads! We talk about an academic paper from 2008 called “The phenomena of inner experience”, and how their results differ from the 2023 Lingthusiasm listener survey questions on your mental pictures and inner voices. We also talk about more unnerving methodologies, like temporarily paralyzing people and then scanning their brains to see if the inner voice sections still light up (they do!).
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Also: Join at the Ling-phabet tier and you’ll get an exclusive “Lingthusiast – a person who’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” sticker! You can stick it on your laptop or your water bottle to encourage people to talk about linguistics with you. Members at the Ling-phabet tier also get their very own, hand-selected character of the International Phonetic Alphabet – or if you love another symbol from somewhere in Unicode, you can request that instead – and we put that with your name or username on our supporter Wall of Fame! Check out our Supporter Wall of Fame here, and become a Ling-phabet patron here!
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Lingthusiasm Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are
On Lingthusiasm, we’ve sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we’re so sorry)… the meat bagpipe!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are. We commissioned Dr. Bethany Gardner to make custom vowel plots for us (which you can see below!) based on how we say certain words during Lingthusiasm episodes, and we talk about how our personal vowel plots let us easily see differences between our Canadian and Australian accents and between when we’re carefully reading a wordlist versus more casually talking on the show. We also talk about where the two numbers per vowel that we graph come from (hint: that’s where the bagpipe comes in), the delightfully wacky keywords used to compare vowels across English varieties (leading us to silly names for real phenomena, like “goose fronting”), and how vowel spaces are linked to other aspects of our identities including regional variation as well as gender and sexuality.
We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the process of making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. We talk about Bethany’s PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular “they”, how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to make nifty vowel plots for us! If you think you might want to map your own vowels or you just like deep dives into the making-of process, this is the bonus episode for you.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
I would love if “getting your vowels done” became the same kind of thing as “getting your colours done” (I’m a deep jewel tones and very fronted front vowels 💅)
This was super fun, we’re so grateful to Dr. Bethany Gardner for working with our team on this, and sharing their workflow.
Unicode 15.1 will be rolling out to phones and computers across this year. It will include lots of new CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) ideographs, some new line-breaking rules for syllabic scripts, and a handfull of new emoji! There’s a phoenix, a breaking chain, a lime and a brown mushroom, as well as new family silhouettes and a handful of existing emoji, but now facing rightward!
The two emoji I’m most excited about are Head Shaking Horizontally and Head Shaking Vertically. That’s head shaking and head nodding to you! I wrote these proposals with Jennifer Daniel and the Unicode emoji subcomittee team.
Why the more elaborate names? Well, Unicode tend to describe emoji by form, not function. That’s for very good reason, because a head nod might be agreement for you, but in other cultures a vertical movement of the head can mean disagreement. This has provided a double challenge for emoji designers, who have to both show movement and also facial features that aren’t too positive or negative. Below are the Emojipedia pair. They’ve done a great job.
These two emoji are actually made by combining a classic emoji face wtih the horizontal (🙂↔️) or vertical arrows (🙂↕️ ) using a special Unicode character called a Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ, ‘zwidge’ to it’s friends), which means that even though they’re two characters they smoosh together to create one emoji. It’s the same process that makes all the different flags, as well as the gender and skin tones.
In fact, all of the emoji in 15.1 are combinations using the ZWJ mechanism; including the phoenix (🐦🔥), lime (🍋🟩) and brown mushroom (🍄🟫 ). Those new right-facing emoji are a combination of the usual left-facing emoji and a rightward arrow🚶➡️ .
It’s exciting that Unicode have decided to try this set of right-facing characters. Many emoji are left-facing, which is a legacy of their Japanese origins (the word order in Japan means that right-facing makes sense). I’ve been complaining about emoji directionality since 2015, and I’m glad that this update will mean that lil emoji dude can finally escape a burning building for those of us with a left-to-right writing system and Subject Verb Object word order. They’ve started with a bunch of people in motion. It will be interesting to see if this set is where it stops or not.
(no no buddy!! To the exit!!)
The use of the ZWJ is an elegant solution because it means that you don’t have to make a whole new codepoint for the emoji, it just uses the old one. If someone doesn’t have their phone or computer update to 15.1 then it should fall back to just showing 🚶➡️, which somewhat conveys the intent. That’s the magic of a good ZWJ combination.
This handbook chapter is a behind-the-scenes of how the Crash Course Linguistics video series came together. I’m really proud that this article includes contributions from the linguistics writing team, including my co-writer Gretchen McCulloch, and our fact checker Jessi Grieser, but also from members of the Complexly team, who produced the show, including Nicole Sweeney, Rachel Alatalo, Hannah Bodenhausen and Ceri Riley. As with the actual videos themselves, this was a dream team. Lingcomm that is inclusive doesn’t just happen as an accident - in this article we discuss some of the ways we set things up to make the best series we could.
This chapter is also a dream project, because it’s part of the excellent double feature: Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics, both edited by Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, & Mary Bucholz for Oxford University Press. These books are both be available through digital open access. They include some of your new favouite classics about the state of linguistics in research, education and outreach, even if you don’t know that just yet.
Abstract
This case study vignette provides an insight into the
choices made in the writing of Crash Course Linguistics (Complexly/PBS 2020).
This series of sixteen 10-minute videos cover core introductory level topics
for English speakers who consume online content. We discuss how the topics were
selected and arranged into a series order. We also discuss the ways we actively
built inclusion into the series workflow and content, including in the team
that worked on the content, the language examples selected and topics covered.
Throughout we discuss the challenges and benefits of working in a collaborative
team that includes a media production company and linguists with a commitment
to public engagement and communication linguistics to new audiences. Sharing
these observations about putting Crash
Course Linguistics together is part of our commitment to using public
communication to advance the standard of public engagement with the field, and
the field’s approach to inclusive practice.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren, Gretchen McCulloch, Nicole Sweeney, Rachel Alatalo, Hannah Bodenhausen, Ceri Riley & Jessi Grieser. 2024. Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics. In Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz (Eds), Inclusion in Linguistics, 383-396. Oxford University Press. [Open Access]
This is a story I used to tell while teaching fieldworkers and other researchers about how to manage their data. It’s a moderately improbable story, but it happened to me and others have benefited from my misadventures. I
haven’t had reason to tell it much lately, and I thought it might be useful
to put into writing. This is a story from before cloud storage was common - back when you
could, and often would, run out of online email storage space.
Content
note: this story includes some unpleasant things that happened to me, including multiple stories of theft (cf. moderately improbable). Also, because it’s stressful for most of the story, I
want to reassure you that it does have a happy conclusion. It
explains a lot of my enthusiasm for good research data management.
In
Australia, ‘honours’ is an optional fourth year for a three year
degree. It’s a chance to do some
more advanced coursework and try your hand at research, with a
small thesis project. Of course, it doesn’t feel small when it’s the
first time you’ve done a project that takes a whole year and is five
times bigger than anything you’ve ever written.
I’ve
written briefly about my honours story (here, and here in a longer post about my late honours supervisor Barb Kelly) . While I did finish my project,
it all ended a bit weirdly when my supervisor Barb got ill and
left during the analysis/writing crunch. The year after finishing honours I got an office job. I hoped to maybe do something more with my honours work, but
I wasn’t sure what, and figured I would wait until Barb was better.
During
that year, my sharehouse flat was broken into and the thief walked out
with the laptop I’d used to do my honours project. The computer had all my university
files on it, including my data and the Word version of my thesis. I lost interview video files,
transcriptions, drafts, notes and everything except the PDF version I
had uploaded to the University’s online portal. Uploading was
optional at the time, if I didn’t do that I probably would have just
been left with a single printed copy. I also lost all my jewellery and my brother’s base guitar, but I was most sad about the data (sorry bro).
Thankfully, I made a backup of my data and files on a USB drive that I kept in my handbag. This was back when a 4GB thumb drive was an investment.
That
Friday, feeling sorry for myself after losing so many things I couldn’t
replace, I decided to go dancing to cheer myself up. While out with a group of friends, my bag was stolen. It was the first time I had a nice handbag, and I still miss it.
Thankfully,
I knew to make more than one back up. I had an older USB that I’d
tucked down the back of the books on my shelf (a vintage 256MB drive my
dad kindly got for me in undergrad after a very bad week when I lost an essay to a corrupted
floppy disk).
When I went to retrieve the files, the drive was (also) corrupted. This happens with hard drives sometimes. My three different copies in three different locations were now lost to me.
Thankfully, my computer had a CD/DVD burner. This was a very cool feature in the mid-tens, and I used to make a lot of mixed CDs for my friends. During my honours project I had burned backed up files on some discs and left them at my parents house.
It was this third backup, kept off site, which became the only copy of my project. I very quickly made more copies.
When
Barb was back at work, and I rejoined her as a PhD student, it meant we
could return to the data and all my notes. The thesis went through a
complete rewrite and many years later was published as a journal
article (Gawne & Kelly 2014). It would have probably never happened if I didn’t have those project files. I continued with the same cautious approach to my research data ever since, including sending home SD cards while on field trips, making use of online storage, and archiving data with institutional repositories while a project is ongoing.
I’m glad that I made enough copies that I learnt a good lesson from a terrible series of events. Hopefully this will prompt you, too, to think about how many copies you have, where they’re located, and what would happen if you lost access to your online storage.
Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture
For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how “oral” vs “ written” culture should perhaps be referred to as “embodied” vs “recorded” culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.
We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Come for the nuclear semiotics and your new favourite Ted Chiang story, stay for Zac Weinersmith’s retelling of Beowulf and the Highly Unscientific “What Episode of Lingthusiasm are you” personality quiz. Truly something for everyone in this episode.
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