May 2016: UK trip, SCOSYA, ExplainLing talks, emoji podcasts, 4th blogiversary

Posted on by Gretchen McCulloch

In May, I went on a trip to the UK, the primary purpose of which was to consult on the public outreach component of the Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA). There’s not much to share about that online yet, because they’re still in the process of interviewing people from 200 communities in Scotland, but it’ll make a really interesting interactive map that I’ll be sharing it once it’s up!

While I was in the UK, I also ran a Wikipedia editathon at Queen Mary London, which had 11 participants who edited articles in 5 languages (9 or 72 articles, depending on how you count).

I did talks about explaining linguistics to the public at SOAS and the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Kent. Here’s the summary blog post about getting linguistics out of the ivory tower – see also the full storify of all the tweets by Laura Bailey, and my slides at bit.ly/explainling-kent.

I also met in person many UK linguists who I’d only known via the internet, including David Crystal, Laura Bailey, Heather Froehlich, Tom Scott, Lane Greene, and Lynne Murphy (plus an interesting museum exhibit). It was lovely to meet you all (as well as all the new folks and people I’d met already, who I’m not going to list because we’d be here all day).

I was interviewed in several places, mostly podcasts:

It was my fourth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! I wrote a roundup of my favourite posts from the past year of blogging. Plus two advice posts:

Selected blog posts:

Selected tweets:

This month’s bookshelfies are from the Waterstones near SOAS/UCL, which has such an extensive linguistics section that it’s divided up by subfield and it took me two pictures to get it all.

Published by Gretchen McCulloch

Internet Linguist, author of Because Internet