Resources for Writers

Time shifting

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The resulting audio file can be played over the radio (sounding a bit like the old dial up noise, as it's just two quickly oscillating notes) and recorded to a cassette tape, which you can then give to your computer to "decode" back into 0's and 1's, which gives you the program file. You can then run it as if you'd installed it from a disk.

10h

holy shit

Artists, creators, students, and researchers of all types, take note:

Digitized photos and text. 2D and 3D object renders. Music and other sound files. Videos. Research datasets. Collections metadata.

On a Creative Commons Zero license: Take what you want. Use it. No permission or attribution required. Yes, even for commercial use.

There are some crafts considered 'extinct' because the whole process isn't completed in the UK, like making cricket balls where most of the steps can be done here but not the stitching for some reason which is outsourced to India. There are lacrosse sticks produced in other countries where it's more popular as a sport, otherwise the whole sport would have died out by now.

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

eBird (birds

Merlin (birds)

citizenscience.gov (big project database, US-based)

iNaturalist (nature)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data) Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)

Cornell Bird Lab (birds)

FoldIt (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

In person

Bioblitz (nature) Species watch (species) Audobon Society (birds)

Also:

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.

In honour of the 100th episode of the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, here is our most popular episode from each "decade" of Lingthusiasm! 

Episode 01 - Speaking a single language won't bring about world peace

Wouldn’t it solve so many problems in the world if everyone just spoke the same language? Not so fast!  

Episode 13 - What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday

If you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? What can we learn from studying the melodies of speech, in addition to the words and sounds? 

Episode 25 - Every word is a real word

We don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it’s not! So why, then, do people feel called to question the wordhood of actual words?  

Episode 39 - How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Why do some conversations seem to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t holding up their end of the conversation? 

Episode 49 - How translators approach a text

How do translators decide whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely? 

Episode 59 - Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind 

We talk about the highly important role of gossip in the development of language, reframing how we introduce people to something they haven’t heard of yet, and ways of synchronizing mental states across groups of people, from conferences to movie voiceovers.

Episode 68 - Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology.

Episode 72 - What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

We answer absurd hypothetical linguistic questions from special guest Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd

Episode 80 - Word magic

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. Saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells and in terms of the real-world linguistics 

Episode 90 - What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are