Tag: swiftkey

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

 

October 2015: SXSW accepted, Polyglot Conference, NELS & NWAV editathons, and storifies

Gretchen McCulloch

My SXSW panel with SwiftKey about the linguistics of emoji was accepted!

I did three Wikipedia editathons, at NELS in Montreal, NWAV in Toronto, and at Queen’s in Kingston. Here’s a summary of all three editathons. The NELS editathon was my last under my Inspire grant from Wikimedia, and it also got picked up in Concordia’s news service which led to me doing an interview about it with CBC Homerun.

I attended Polyglot Conference in New York City, which I’ve storified the livetweets from. I also storified my livetweeting of Rainbow Rowell’s new book, Carry On, as well as a linguistic parody of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space that I wrote a while back.

Articles for Mental Floss:

I did interviews for a number of articles:

And several of my previous articles got picked up elsewhere:

Selected blog posts:

I took so many cute wugshots this month I couldn’t pick just one. Here’s a series of crocheted wugs which Concordia linguistics student Caitlin Stahl made and brought to NELS, a wug I drew on a children’s magnetic toy in a store in NYC, and a line of marching wugs from a blackboard in the University of Toronto linguistics department.

crocheted wugs wug toy wugboard

August 2015: SXSW proposal, language disruptors, vintage internet slang, back-to-school link roundup & linguistics + X

Gretchen McCulloch

I’ve started working with SwiftKey, a mobile keyboard app company, on analyzing some of their extensive data on how people use emoji. We’ve got a panel proposal up for South by Southwest Interactive which you can see more details about and vote for, if you’re so inclined.

I wrote my first piece for Quartz, about how young women have been disrupting language ever since Shakespeare, and it got picked up by the Smithsonian Magazine.

I revisited the classic handbook of cutting-edge 90s internet language, Wired Style and wrote about its retro internet slang and how I became a descriptivist for The Toast and then explored further vintage slang from it in a follow-up on Mental Floss. I also wrote for Mental Floss about the two kinds of hashtags, index and commentary.

I livetweeted my thoughts about an advance copy of David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention, which I’ve summed up in a Storify (with sneak peeks of the book).

I published a back-to-school link round up on All Things Linguistic, as well as a career advice post, Linguistics + X.

Selected blog posts:

Here’s a picture of my paper copy of Wired Style that I hunted down secondhand since it’s now out of print. wired style