Matthew Lahrman |
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Dear Subscribers, Hello, I'm Matthew Lahrman, a Graduate Assistant here at The LINGUIST List. On behalf of LINGUIST I would like to welcome you to another Fund Drive. Every year we students write expressing how important your funding is to us, and this year I thought that, rather than launch right into an exposition of the merits of LINGUIST, I'd like to take you backstage, into an average day at LINGUIST for a student (me!) working here. -------- DONATE! https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm --------- What does the student do in an average day at LINGUIST? Well, if you're like me, you sign in, check your mail, and find a bunch of emails waiting for you. After you answer these, you go to post your areas. I am responsible for three areas of the site: FYI's - where we post general announcements of concern to LINGUISTS, everything from announcements of new resources available to the monthly 'Speculative Grammarian' (the premier journal in the underdeveloped field of Satirical linguistics). Find our FYI's here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/indices/FYI2009r.html Ask-A-Linguist - this is the area of the site where amateur linguists and general seekers of knowledge can put questions to our panel of professional linguists. As an editor moderating this exchange, I can honestly say that I've gained a wealth of knowledge about how people see linguistics 'from the outside'. This perspective has proved invaluable to me, as I am currently attempting to make the transition from an amateur to a professional linguist. What I mean is that it seems to me that as we gain knowledge and become more entrenched within a specific field we often lose perspective about how those outside of the field view and conceptualize of things. By mediating between the amateur and professional linguist, I have learned to redirect and sharpen the focus of those asking questions to guide them towards the information they are seeking. I have also learned a lot about many diverse areas of linguistics and the questions that both drive us and plague us as linguists. Check out the area if you've never been: http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/index.html Media - This is the area of the site where linguistics makes its rare entrance into the public sphere-and we announce it. When a linguist appears on a television or radio program, or a magazine, newspaper, or film features something that is linguistically relevant, we want to get it out there to publicize our loved but (largely) unknown field. Find linguistics in the news here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/indices/Media2009r.html When I'm done with all this posting, I switch from error-hunting editor to linguistic cartographer in our next project: LL-MAP. LL-MAP - This is a project designed to integrate language information with data from the physical and social sciences by means of a Geographical Information System (GIS). In this project, we're bringing together maps with linguistic and ethnolinguistic data together with other types of data to create new linguistic perspectives. This project also marks LINGUIST's first foray into the growing field of Geolinguistics. Check it out here: http://llmap.org/ As you can see here, what we do isn't the norm for the graduate student in the field of linguistics-it is much more wide-ranging (and frightening)-and we like it that way. We keep your linguistics engine well-oiled both by serving your logistical needs (conference announcements, job postings, publications announcements) and your hunger for linguistic knowledge (FYI, Ask-A-Linguist, Q's). We put a lot of work into our site and we'd really like to show you what we're doing. We're a small team of dedicated individuals doing unusual and creative work who rely on your support for our subsistence. Please give something back by contributing this Fund Drive season. https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm All the best, Matthew Lahrman View Matt's personal page View Matt's hometown tour! |
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