Resources

I’m interested in many ways of bridging the gap between people inside and outside academia who are interested in linguistics! Here are some of them: 

LingComm

I’ve done assorted activities to promote linguistics communication to broader audiences, aka lingcomm. For new activities and periodic relevant links, follow @LingComm on twitter and check the #lingcomm hashtag and lingcomm.org.

In 2021, I co-founded #LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, with co-chair Lauren Gawne, organizing committee members Jessi Grieser and Laura Bailey, and conference manager Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!). We produced the following blog posts about running better online conferences and events. 

  1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
  2. Designing online conferences for building community
  3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
  4. Hosting online conferences for building community
  5. Budgeting online conferences or events

In 2020, Lauren Gawne and I created the LingComm Grants, four $500 grants to support emerging lingcomm projects. 

I’ve also done classes and workshops on communicating linguistics or LingComm. I did a week-long intensive lingcomm class at the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) summer institute in Canberra, Australia in November 2018 and an afternoon workshop at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) in December 2018.

I taught a four-week lingcomm class at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) summer institute in Lexington, Kentucky in July 2017. Here’s a summary of the class notes as blog posts:

  1. Day 1: Goals
  2. Day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure
  3. Day 3: The Curse of Knowledge and short talks
  4. Day 4: Myth debunking and in-person events
  5. Day 5 & 6: Events, self-promotion, and charades
  6. Day 7 & 8: Pitching and final projects

I’ve done LingComm talks and workshops at the following universities:

  • Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting, Adelaide, December 2018
  • Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language summer school, Australian National University, Canberra, November 2018
  • Linguistic Summer Institute, University of Kentucky, Lexington, July 2017 (class notes on my blog)
  • University of Kent, Cambridge, UK, May 2016 (bit.ly/explainling-kent)
  • SOAS, London, May 2016
  • University of Edinburgh, May 2016
  • 25th Annual Linguistics Symposium at Cal State Fullerton (keynote)
  • Georgetown University, Washington D.C., January 2016
  • University of Ottawa, November 2015
  • University of Toronto, November 2015

I’ve also judged the Linguistic Society of America’s Five-Minute Linguist competition: lively and engaging talks by linguists for the general public, 2017-present

Crash Course Linguistics

I was a writer for Crash Course Linguistics along with Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser (fact-checker), a series of 16 ten-minute introductory linguistics videos for the educational youtube channel Crash Course. Watch the first video below, or see the full playlist here (all captioned in English). 

Mutual Intelligibility

During the first year of the covid pandemic, when schools and universities were rapidly pivoting to online teaching, Lauren Gawne and I co-produced Mutual Intelligibility, a newsletter to compile existing online resources for teaching linguistics, with a special focus on video resources (which were the top requested category from instructors), under the managing editorship of Liz McCullough and with assorted other guest contributors. 

A full list of Mutual Intelligiblity posts can be found here, including 16 companion posts for each of the 16 Crash Course Linguistics videos with exercises and further reading/watching/listening to dive deeper into each topic, 6 in-depth Resource Guides to common intro topics, and 23 short Three Links posts with three quick links about a wide variety of linguistics topics at various levels. 

LingWiki

I’ve organized edit-a-thons (workshops to improve the linguistics-related articles on Wikipedia) under the hashtag #lingwiki regularly since 2015.

I co-taught a week-long workshop on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages with Lauren Gawne at CoLang 2016 in Fairbanks, Alaska in June 2016. Our slides can be found at:

Videos

I collaborated on two episode of PBS Idea Channel with Mike Rugnetta, which you can watch below:

I’ve co-written a series of Language Files videos with YouTuber Tom Scott, which you can watch below:

Of particular note is “why typing like this is sometimes okay.” which is based on my book, BECAUSE INTERNET

Academic talks and papers

Emoji as digital gesture. (2019.) Paper in the open-access journal Language@Internet, co-authored with Lauren Gawne. (Written summary in The Conversation; spoken version on Lingthusiasm.)

Review of Danesi 2017. (2019.) Book review in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. (Self-archived pdf version; lighthearted Twitter thread version.)

Internet linguistics: Why online language matters. Public Lecture at the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language summer school, Canberra, Australia. November 2018.

Linguistics in the Public Ear: Outreach via Podcasts and Radio. Panel that I organized at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah. January 2018. I also co-presented a talk on this panel about Lingthusiasm, with my cohost Lauren Gawne. More about the panel.

Emoji Grammar as Beat Gesture. (2018.) Paper co-authored with Lauren Gawne in the Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media (Emoji 2018).

Wayyy Longgg: Orthotactics and Phonology in Lengthening on Twitter. With Jeff Lamontagne at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Austin, Texas, January 2017. Slides at bit.ly/longggg

Stumbling into Linguistics: Blogs and Wikipedia. Talk on a panel about Getting High Schoolers into Linguistics, which I also co-organized. Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Austin, Texas. January 2017. My slides at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017

Calling All #Tumblinguists. On panel Linguistics Outreach via Online Media, Linguistics Society of America (LSA) annual meeting, Portland, OR. January 2015.

Resources elsewhere

Compilations of resources that I maintain or contribute to elsewhere on the internet include: 

For other projects that I’m not actively working on or frequently referring to at this point, see the Archive page.