#lingstitute

Bonus 80: Postcards from linguistics summer camp

What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with linguists all day every day? Well, this event exists, sort of, and they're called linguistics institutes. 

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about Gretchen's visit to the 2023 LSA institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst this summer. We talk about cool projects that Gretchen learned about at this year's Lingstitute, including the Linguistic Atlas Project, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (talks about all of these projects are now available online). We also talk about the history of LSA summer institutes (the first one was in 1928, almost a hundred years ago!), why they're not to be confused with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which is a missionary project for Bible translation (awkward), and both Gretchen's history attending various institutes and Lauren's history not attending them (sorry about the FOMO though).

In June and July, I headed to Lingstitute 2023, the LSA summer institute, at UMass Amherst. It was great to get to hang out with old friends and meet lots of new people While I was in Massachusetts, I dropped by the headquarters of Merriam Webster to say hi to the dictionaries and lexicographers! (In that order.) Thanks especially to Peter Sokolowski for the guided tour and to Stacy Dickerman…

July 2019 newletter: Because Internet is published and makes the NYT Bestseller list!

There was a New York Times Daily review of Because Internet (paper version!). Here’s one of the very nice things that reviewer Jennifer Szalai had to say about it:

McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.

There was also SO…

Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.

In 2017, podcasting turned from a fun new experiment into a real, self-sustaining project, I checked off half of the American states on my have-visited list thanks to conference rotation (lifetime, not just in this year), and I got my book way closer to being a real thing you’ll get to see soon.

Lingthusiasm podcast

My podcast with Lauren Gawne, which…

My newsletter for July 2017: teaching #LingComm class, attending #lingstitute, and crochet wug

This month, I was quoted in this New York Times article about how we type laughter online.

The tenth Lingthusiasm episode went up, about learning languages linguistically, and the Patreon bonus was about hypercorrection.

I taught a four-week class on communicating linguistics or LingComm at the LSA institute in Lexington, Kentucky.  The day-to-day class notes can be found on the @LingComm twitter…

This addition to the linguistics baked goods files was made by Martha McGinnis-Archibald at the University of Victoria. 

Previously: LingComm day 1: Goals and #LingComm day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure

We started by looking through the twitter threads that people created from last time, talking about what was easy and difficult. You can see these threads on the #lingcomm hashtag -- there were some nice interactions with people outside the class too!  

We did an exercise on the curse of knowledge where one group tapped out a song and tried to get the other group to guess it. In the lab, researchers have found that about 40% of tappers think that their song is clear, while only 2.5% of guessers actually succeed in guessing it. Our percentages were slightly different than that because one group chose the song “We Will Rock You”, which of course has a distinctive clap pattern. (Very clever, dangit.)

We then talked through a few quotes from this article by Steven Pinker, which was the reading, about how already knowing things makes it hard to remember what it was like to know have known them. 

We looked at a couple approaches to fixing it, from the mechanistic (like up-goer five, which makes you use only the 1000 most common English words) to the imaginative (like having an “ideal reader” in mind who doesn’t have a background in the topic). 

Then we had a break for improv games! We started with a quick clap-passing game (synchro-clap) as a warmup, and then moved into telling a collaborative story one sentence at a time, three words at a time, and one word at a time. One of the key things about this game is not being a mind-reader: other people are going to take the story in different directions than you anticipated!