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superlinguo · 1 month

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New Research Article: Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics

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]

See Also:

Open Access for the whole Inclusion in Linguistics volume

Crash Course Linguistics on YouTube

Mutual Intelligibility posts for Crash Course Linguistics

#linguistics #language #crash course #crash course linguistics #lingcomm #inclusion in linguistics #publications

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alliterative-endlessknot · 4 months

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The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is SKI/SCIENCE/SHODDY #ski #science #shoddy

#ski #skiing #science #shoddy #etymology #wotd #connectedatbirth #words #language #linguistics #word nerd #wordnerd #history of the english language #history of english #historical linguistics #lingcomm #lingblr

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allthingslinguistic · 8 months

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A vision for the field - How to frame a plenary talk

This is a post about how I think about plenary/keynote talks at conferences, brought to you by a friend asking for ideas on their plenary, expanded on as a thread on Bluesky (yeah I guess we're on Bluesky now), and repeated here for archival purposes because I think it might be useful for others!

First, a definition of terms: I'm using plenary to mean a big talk that's not cross-scheduled against anything else at a conference, thus implicitly aimed at all attendees at the conference. I think a keynote is basically the same but academic conferences tend to call it a plenary, at least in linguistics. I'm framing it around linguistics for the sake of having a few concrete examples and because that's what I work in, but people have already been telling me that they think it applies to other fields as well.

The thing I always hope for from a plenary is a vision for the field.

This is your chance to get people excited about work in a particular direction or that addresses a particular type of question!

The impact that a plenary can have is to fire people up:

inspire people to work or collaborate on that area

encourage people to pay attention to work in that area or be able to tell people about work in that area

give people who are already working on an area renewed energy on why it's important

The plenaries I've really liked are generally framed around "why". Why do this work? Why have I spent decades of my life on this?

Which leads into more detailed findings about a few specific things, to get people up to speed if they're unfamiliar or contextualize work into a bigger picture for people who are relatively familiar.

And then back out to why and hopes for future directions.

I say that a plenary is about an area or topic rather than a subfield because highlighting an approach or methodology or value system or something is also a great way of doing a plenary (and a whole subfield is possibly too broad anyway). Some examples:

Why is it important to look at this particular language, variety, or family?

Why is it interesting to do research at the intersection of these two areas, how can they cross-pollinate each other?

Why approach language using (a particular approach) as baseline?

This "why" structure of a plenary often fits nicely with a bit of personal reflection on how you got interested in the topic in the first place and how you situate yourself in the history of the field, especially as plenaries are often given by people relatively senior to a field who were there for (and indeed created) some of the history that more junior people might not know about.

However, this is not to be confused with a common historicizing template for plenaries that ALMOST works: "this is what I've done". Better to fit that retrospective into "this is why I've done it and what I hope other people can do as a result". You've been doing this for decades, surely there was a reason why! (If you've forgotten what this is because you've been too close to the nitty-gritty details for too long, sometimes asking a few friends or colleagues can help.)

People also have challenges with figuring out what level a plenary should be pitched at:

How much background information should the speaker assume the audience has, when they can vary from students to senior professors?

In my opinion, the level of assumed background knowledge of a plenary talk at a general linguistics conference should be pitched around first year grad student, for two reasons:

There are students in the audience!

Profs who don't specialize in the topic probably last touched it in grad school (which might have been 30 years ago)

You can scale this level of assumed background knowledge up or down depending on how niche the conference is. For example, a plenary at a phonetics conference can assume more specific phonetics knowledge, and at a general scicomm conference, it needs to assume much less shared background knowledge (people probably know about academic journals and statistical significance but not concepts specific to a field).

But in any case, it is a great idea to include a slide or two getting everyone on the same page about what some key concepts are. Even if you think half the room knows it already, people don't mind seeing familiar info as much as you think they do (in fact, if they're super experienced then they probably also have to explain it to unfamiliar people sometimes, so it's helpful for their own explanations to see a nice summary definition!)

In my opinion, the ideal state to leave an audience member in after a plenary address is somewhere on the spectrum of "now I'm all fired up to keep doing this work" to "I never thought about doing work in this area before but now I sorta want to do so?"

Summary: A plenary is a chance to think about the unifying threads animating why you've been doing what you do and where you hope it leads. In other words, what's the positive subtweet that you wish you could give the field? Sometimes people grumble to a few friends "I wish people would care about x". Well, here's a chance to reframe that into: "here's what it could look like when we care about x".

Also, Amy Plackowski added a helpful comment on bluesky that if there is a theme of the conference then the plenary should connect in some way! (I'd say it's useful to make this connection explicit at the beginning and end of the talk.)

#linguistics #academia #scicomm #lingcomm #meta #how to #advice #plenary #plenaries

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linguisticdiscovery · 1 year

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The Big List of Linguistics Podcasts

Do you listen to podcasts and love language and linguistics? Check out the Big List of Linguistics Podcasts!

#linguistics #podcast #language #science #SciComm #LingComm

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frettchanstudios · 1 year

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My illustration, (recently titled "Gaaḵ (Raven)") which was commissioned by the @endangeredlanguagesproject based on the theme of language revitalization will be on display at the International Conference on Linguistics Communication 2023, starting tomorrow. The event is held on @gather_town, a very cool digital space that gives total video game vibes and you can interact with me, view the artwork, and/or read about it. I'll be popping in and out over the course of the multi-day event.

#language revitalization #endangered languages #indigenous art #Frettchan Studios #Chantelle Trainor-Matties #conference #gather #artist #Indigenous artist #Native #Raven #Language #LingComm #Linguistics #Gather Town #Artist Alley #gallery #digital space #virtual event

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lingthusiasm · 3 months

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Bonus 84: Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires!

First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would be? We've made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like "You're about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to sustain you" into a Highly Accurate Window Into Your Personality. Gretchen and Lauren take the quiz on air and share our own results -- please let us know what you get and if this quiz helps you remember an older episode or figure out how to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm!

Second: we have results from the Lingthusiasm survey that many of you took last year! Find out whether Lingthusiasm listeners consider the show more kiki or more bouba, and highlights from your very extensive comments on whether your sister's husband's sister is still your sister-in-law, whether the thumb is a finger, and more gestures that are rude in some places. A few survey results also appear in an academic paper that we wrote: "Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study" which was published in Language and Linguistics Compass (open access).

Finally, a few updates: For 2024, Gretchen is heading to the Societas Linguistica Europea conference in Helsinki in August and Lauren is heading back to full-time prof work, teaching syntax and turning gestures and Lingthusiasm research into papers. Plus: the LingComm Grants are running again for 2024. Listen to this episode about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #bonus #bonus episodes #bonuses #questionaire #quiz #survey #survey results #personality quiz #uquiz

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thoughtportal · 4 months

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In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about language policy and how organizations and nation-states make language decisions that affect people’s everyday lives. We also talk about the excellent recent lingcomm book Memory Speaks by Julie Sedivy, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (currently ongoing!), and many ways of unpacking the classic quote about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy.

#lingthusiasm #linguistics #language #podcasts #podcast #SoundCloud

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lingcomm-library · 3 years

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I’ve read “Shady Characters. The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks” by Keith Houston

This book was published in 2014. It cronicles the histories of several punctuation marks and other typographical characters of English. There are chapters on the pilcrow ¶, the interrobang ‽, the octothorpe #, the ampersand &, the @ symbol, the asterisk * and dagger †, the hyphen -, the dash –, the manicule ☛, quotation marks “” and typographic depictions of irony.

In many of the chapters you can read about the origins of additional typographic marks. So if you’re wondering (like I did) why Houston wouldn’t want to tell me about the comma, don’t worry. It’s in there. I especially enjoyed learning about the origins of the @ symbol and its associations with trading. I was not the biggest fan of the chapter on irony, especially irony on the *~internet~*, but oh well.

I found the book educational and entertaining. You learn a lot about stuff that is not technically typographical. But that is to be expected, since Houston wants to accurately set the scene for the contexts in which every mark was created and how it has developed ever since.

There are just the right amount of graphics in the book to depict certain marks in old manuscripts or variations of marks such as the ampersand.

I was especially fond of the colour work: While the whole text is (expectedly) set in a black font, all the “special” typographical marks (not stops or commas, though) are set in red:

[Depicted above is a photo of part of a book page. All the typographical marks such as asterisks, daggers etc. appear in red when they are part of the main text.]

The book ends with a small annotated further reading section and a vast notes section full of further further readings.

I recommend “Shady Characters” to all typography nerds and fans of historical graphematics and punctuation. From reading this, you will learn when to use which dash (what the heck, english?), a lot about the people working at the library of Alexandria and the consequences of limited space on typewriters.

I did some livetweeting while reading here (in German), if you’re interested in such things.

#linguistics #lingcomm #typography #shady characters #keith houston #punctuation #graphematics #etymology #12in21lingcomm

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alliterative-endlessknot · 5 months

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The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is WINTER/WHISKY #wotd #winter #whisky #whiskey

#winter #whisky #whiskey #etymology #wotd #connectedatbirth #words #language #linguistics #word nerd #wordnerd #history of the english language #history of english #historical linguistics #lingcomm #lingblr

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superlinguo · 9 months

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New Open Access Publication: Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study

Films have behind-the-scenes commentary tracks, Lingthusiasm now has a behind-the-scenes research article (a DOI rather than a DVD).

This new Open Access article in Language and Linguistics Compass is an introduction to a variety of evidence-based practice from linguistics, education, and psychology we have drawn upon and further developed in the first seven years of creating Lingthusiasm. We introduce you to a lot of the ways we think about framing, jargon, metaphor and putting feeling into our favourite linguistics topics. We argue that this is not just the basis of our work on the podcast, but a way of formalising the contribution that lingcomm (linguistics communication) can make to the larger field of scicomm (science communication). We also share some results from our 2022 listener survey that illustrate how our audience is receptive to the work we're doing.

We hope that it provides a bit of an insight into how we do what we do, but also inspires other linguists to communication their research - whether that's in a 3 minute thesis competition, a blog post for your institution, or "trying out [lingcomm] explanations during relevant, natural occasions in local communities" (i.e., chatting with friends and family, which is where we come up with some of our best episode ideas!).

Abstract

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

Citation

Gawne, L., & McCulloch, G. (2023). ‘Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study’, Language and Linguistics Compass, 17/5: e12499. DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12499 [OA publication]