Tag: bookshelfies

September 2016: Second book draft, #Wulf4Ham, linguistics jobs interviews

Gretchen McCulloch

I hit a book milestone: I finished the second major draft! Details and sneak peaks into the writing process. I also made a central information page for the book.

I was quoted in two articles, That time when “That time when” took over the Internet (Washington Post) and the evolution of emoji from emoticons (Japan Times). I also storified the Beowulf/Hamilton crossover, #Wulf4Ham.

I restarted the series of interviews for the linguistics jobs series on All Things Linguistic, with the help of Elena Russo, and also created a handy linguistics jobs overview page. New interviews: with a book publicist, science fiction writer, and policy analyst.

I’m currently heading to Dawn or Doom, a conference at Purdue University about technology and culture, where I’ll be giving a talk about the linguistics of emoji, so you can keep an eye on #DawnOrDoom for livetweets! I also announced this month that I’ll be giving a workshop at EmojiCon in November in the Bay Area.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s bookshelfie is a photo I took when I stopped in Reykjavik briefly on my way back from the UK in May. Mál og Menning didn’t have much of a linguistics section, but the balcony and hanging bird cutouts were charming anyway.

reykjavik-bookshelfie

July 2016: Lexicon Valley podcast on emoji & public linguistics, Science Friday on expressive punctuation

Gretchen McCulloch

I did an interview on the Lexicon Valley podcast with summer host John McWhorter, talking about emoji, internet language, and being a public linguist. It was a treat to get to do a long interview with a fellow linguist, so I’d definitely recommend that one!

I did a live interview on Science Friday, talking about about expressive punctuation and internet tone of voice.

I livetweeted N.K. Jemisin’s latest book, The Obelisk Gate, from a linguistics perspective. (See also my livetweet of her previous book, The Fifth Season.) I also tweeted a bit about the linguistics of the new Ghostbusters movie.

I changed the colour of the logo for All Things Linguistic from black & white to teal.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet month with lots of book writing and editing happening behind the scenes. Nothing official to announce there yet, but you can check out my #amwriting tweets for cryptic snippets of the writing process (mostly me fighting with spellcheck).

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s bookshelfie is a literal selfie that I took in the window of Elizabeth’s Books in Lunenburg – yes, that’s my hair in silhouette! lunenburg window bookshelfie

June 2016: Old English & Emoji on The Toast, #lingwiki at #CoLang2016 in Alaska

Gretchen McCulloch

In June, I had two new articles that I wrote go up on The Toast before it closed:

I’m sad to say goodbye to The Toast, but was rather amused to notice that I now get a very oblique claim to fame: my last article seems is up on the front page in perpetuity, alongside Hillary Clinton.

I did an interview with The Ringer about the AP Stylebook’s decision to lowercase “internet”, which turned into a sneak peak from my book proposal and why I’d always intended to keep internet lowercase in the book.

Other media:

I spent the latter two weeks of June in Fairbanks, Alaska, at CoLang, the Institute on Collaborative Language Research, where I co-taught a weeklong mini-course on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages with the fantabulous Lauren Gawne (aka Superlinguo).

I also found out that I’m officially going to be teaching a course about linguistics outreach at the 2017 Linguistic Summer Institute (Lingstitute).

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts from All Things Linguistic:

This month’s bookshelfie was taken at Gulliver’s Books in Fairbanks, Alaska. It didn’t have a proper linguistics section, but it was still a lovely bookstore, so here’s the languages section and some bikeshare Fairbikes with books outside.

 

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

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.

April 2016: California talks, book rough draft, Idea Channel & Science Friday on emoji

Gretchen McCulloch

 

I took a trip to California! I gave a keynote address at the 25th annual CSU Fullerton Linguistic Symposium (my slides at bit.ly/explainling-fullerton). A few days later, I went into the offices of Dictionary.com and gave a talk in conversation with Jane Solomon. You can hear an audio excerpt here, where I talk about the idea of an “internet era” of English. (If you want to see some non-linguistic updates  from California, mostly food pics, you can check out my instagram.)

I hit a book milestone: 100k words of a (very rough) draft. You can see a celebratory screencap and read a few thoughts about the writing process. I also made an email mailing list specifically for very occasional book updates, so if you want to make sure you don’t miss any important internet language book news on social media, you can sign up for that here.

I collaborated on an episode of PBS Idea Channel about emoji with Mike Rugnetta:

I was also on NPR with a live interview on Science Friday, talking about the recent study finding that many emoji get misinterpreted, especially 😁, with the study’s lead author Hannah Miller. You can listen to the interview on souncloud.

In other media, I’m quoted in a Daily Dot article about the “snek” meme, a Daily Dot article about dialects of internet communities, and a BBC Future article about why we’re talking differently about the web/internet/cyberspace.

Selected blog posts:

Here’s my favourite tweet of the month:

Photos are from the Last Bookstore in LA, which has an ordinary-looking linguistics section but and then some gorgeous book art. 😍😍😍

Agenda for May: Scotland!

March 2016: SXSW talk about emoji and many emoji interviews

Gretchen McCulloch

March was a month of emoji!

I gave a talk at SXSW about the linguistics of emoji in collaboration with SwiftKey. You can see our slides with notes, listen to our full talk, see pictures, and view the livetweets on #EmojiLang. The talk was a lot of fun and we had a full audience of 275 people.

There was a lot of media from my SXSW talk from around the world:

I also had two print interviews go out, both about emoji: in WIRED with Clive Thompson and in the Austin Chronicle’s SXSW Interactive special edition. I also met a lot of great people and went to some fantastic talks at SXSW – you can see a list of other interesting things to check out at the bottom of this post.

Other media included:

I also participated in the Art+Feminism Wikipedia editathon for the 3rd year.

Selected blog posts:

Here are photos the two print interviews plus a bonus picture of the linguistics section at The Last Bookstore in Austin, Texas (shelved, interestingly, next to public speaking).

wired emojiIMG_ovuwdsIMG_-fdml5d

 

February 2016: Fansplaining podcast interview, #lingchat, TV in Singapore

Gretchen McCulloch

I did a nice long interview on internet language and fandom language on the podcast Fansplaining, episode 15 ~fanspeak, which you can listen to on soundcloud or read the transcript of on tumblr. Key quote: “Your language is not my language but your language is okay.”

I was also the featured guest for a twitter #lingchat on internet language, which you can read on storify. I also storified my twitter comments about the novel The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. And linguist twitter had some fun riffing on the “Champagne toasts for my real friends” chiasmic toast, also storified.

I did several interviews:

This month was a pretty quiet book-writing month, but I’ve got a lot of travel lined up for the spring, starting with South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in March where I’m giving a talk about the linguistics of emoji.

Selected blog posts:

This is a picture that I took in Trident Books in Halifax a while back. They didn’t have a linguistics section, but I was struck by them having an entire label for “impermanence”.

impermanence bookshelfie

January 2016: LSA in DC, Explaining linguistics talks, Star Wars, twitter advice

Gretchen McCulloch

I gave two talks in Washington DC, one at the LSA sister society meeting of The Association for Linguistic Evidence about explaining linguistics for forensic linguists (slides at bit.ly/explainling-lsa2016) and one at Georgetown about Writing, Talking, and Working Linguistics (slides at bit.ly/explainling-georgetown).

In the leadup to the LSA, I posted this advice post on how to “get” twitter. Also at the LSA annual meeting in DC, I held a #lingwiki Wikipedia editathon (see the report on articles edited) and did the LSA’s public relations for the weekend, including liaising with media attendees and running social media on the @LingSocAm twitter account with LSA intern Kat Starcevic. I’d also recommend checking out John Rickford’s LSA presidential address about linguistic injustice in the courtroom (in video and livetweet form).

I was quoted in several articles:

I also watched the new Star Wars movie and storified some thoughts that I and other twitter people had about how the languages make sense (spoiler: they don’t, really).

Selected blog posts:

Here’s a photo I took of the linguistics section at Second Story Books in DC:

second story books dc

September 2015: Ship names, radio Drive interviews, swearing in GDocs, and Linguists@Montréal

Gretchen McCulloch

I did two radio interviews this month, both of which happened to be national Drive programs, in Canada (CBC), talking about emoji and Australia (ABC), talking about language on twitter. You can listen online at their respective links.

I had a Toast article go up about the linguistics of ship names — how names like Johnlock and Brittana and Dramione get put together.

Articles for Mental Floss:

I wrote an article for Strong Language about how the new voice transcription feature in Google Docs is censoring some swear words, which got picked up by a lot of news outlets: Wired, Gawker, The Register, Fusion, The Daily Dot, and Business Insider.

One of my blog posts on All Things Linguistic, about “you’re welcome” versus “no problem” and phatic communication, got picked up by Buzzfeed and turned into a gif-post.  The Quartz article I wrote last month about young women’s speech also got picked up in an article at New York University.

I started a linguistics meetup group, Linguists@Montréal, loosely inspired by Linguistics in the Pub, and we had our first few inaugural events. If you’re a linguist living in or visiting Montreal, feel free to join the Facebook group or check it out to see if there’s an event happening when you’re around! (There will be a pub night the Thursday before NELS.)

Selected blog posts on All Things Linguistic:

Upcoming: I’m going to three conferences in October, Polyglot Conference in New York City, NELS in Montreal, and NWAV in Toronto. Details here, but I’ll be livetweeting using the hashtags: #pcnyc15, #nels46, and #nwav44 if you’d like to follow along!

Here’s a bookshelfie I took at Powell’s in Hyde Park when I was in Chicago in July, with some fancy filters:

linguistics bookshelf powells bw