January 2015: Tumblinguists, LSA editathon report, WOTY, interviews, and an excellent shelf of books

I started the year at the Linguistics Society of America’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, where I spoke on a panel about popularizing linguistics in online media. I represented tumblr and tumblinguists, and you can view my slides online here; I’m told there will also be a video online eventually, so I’ll link to that whenever it’s up. I also organized a Wikipedia editathon to improve linguistics-related articles, which had 27 participants and improved at least 41 articles. Editathon links:

• How-to slides: bit.ly/lingwiki
• Report (graphs, comments, list of edited articles) on how the first editathon went
• How to participate even if you’re not there in person

I’m currently organizing a second editathon to take place online around the #lingwiki hashtag. Please fill out the doodle poll here if you want your time preferences/timezone to be taken into consideration when scheduling it.

Several interviews with me (and various other linguists) are now online:

• At the super bowl of linguistics, may the best word win (New York Times)
• Internet language lexicon (Gizmodo)
• Does the internet have dialects? (Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU)

And I’m not interviewed, but I’m one of the many linguists that you can spot in this Word of the Year newsclip from Al Jazeera.

I also wrote several posts about the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote on Lexicon Valley:

• Why we should declare an emoticon of the year
• Is a hashtag a word? The case of #BlackLivesMatter

Selected blog posts

• On uptalk: “Young women shouldn’t have to talk like men to be taken seriously”
• Realistic translation of ancient writing in film
• “And she was like O_O” – Animation of reported speech on Twitter
• Jesperson’s Cycle 
• The weird science of naming new products
• How to type IPA on your phone (Android and iOS)

[Update: I forgot to mention that All Things Linguistic also now has a new theme, with a large header image like all the cool kids these days.]

Here’s a picture that I took in Portland at Powell’s Books — I’ve never seen such a large linguistics section at a general-audience bookstore (and this picture doesn’t even include all of it!). The linguistics section was pretty picked-over by the time I got there on Sunday, but I heard that several linguists found some good deals!