LINGUIST List 6.1473

Sat Oct 21 1995

All: Conference announcement policy

Editor for this issue: <aristartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. "The LINGUIST List", Confpolicy

[Moderators' note: We're posting the responses to the newly announced
conference policy which were sent to LINGUIST (others were sent to
individual moderators), because we thought it might be useful to
provide a forum for public discussion of the policy before we institute
it. As you will see from the messages below, one serious concern is
that many people don't have Web access. That was why we said we would
include in the announcement that the conference program was available
at the email address of the organizer or contact person. Remember that we
are only talking about the conference _program_ here; the initial
announcement of the conference will be posted to everyone, so long as
it meets the length guidelines. We thought that the people requesting
the full program via e-mail would be few, and so could be dealt with
by the organizers. However, the suggestion below that organizers
edit the program itself to the essentials for posting to the LINGUIST
e-mail list is a very good one. Certainly, if a conference organizer
is willing to edit the program down to a list of presenters and paper
titles, without unnecessary lines, we'll be happy to post it.

We'll hold off on instituting the new policy until we get all your
responses and suggestions. -Helen and Anthony]

 ************************

>Date: Sat, 21 Oct 1995 00:50:24 -0500
>From: Peter Daniels <pdanielspress-gopher.uchicago.edu>
>Subject: Re: 6.1466, FYI: Minimal Information Grammar, New Policy for Confs

The New Policy for Confs is extremely welcome! I'd suggest that (since I
don't have Web access--though anyway nearly none of the listed conferences
are of inteest to me) you have organizers give a list of nothing but speaker
and title of each paper being included, for the e-mail list (and don't even
put a line break between author and title!). That we way we know what the
conference is about, which on occasion is not apparent ffrom its title (and
nnot just when the title is "CLS 32"!). Thanks!



>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 95 20:41:20 EDT
>From: "J. A. Rea" <JAREAUKCC.UKY.EDU>
>Subject: Re: 6.1466, FYI: Minimal Information Grammar, New Policy for Confs


Remember that the "Web" is terra incognita for most of us, and thus not
a valid way of communicating information.

As a separate topic, it has been disheartening to see a "table of contents"
for conference announcements that is either truncated and thus uninformative,
or wors, consists of meaningless initials: this prevents us from using
our delete message functions, and makes us read into the announcement, often
more than a page, to find out what it is a conference of. In general,
please try to keep headers and "contents" lists more fully descriptive.

Ki semenat ispinaza, non andet iskultsu!

J. A. Rea jareaukcc.uky.edu



>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 15:47:18 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Diego Quesada <dquesadaepas.utoronto.ca>
>Subject: Re: 6.1466, FYI: Minimal Information Grammar, New Policy for Confs


CATEGORICALLY AGAINST THE PROPOSED POLICY!

If we have to stand in our mail boxes sometimes idiotic quests from lost,
hopeless and amateur students searching "for an alternative way to say
thank you in X", or a linguist leaving much to be desired who needs
"hints on how to plan and teach a course in X, why shouldn't others
(better, *those*) also get information that might (or won't be, as would
be expected, since it's only for those who *do* show up in conferences
and *do* serious research) or might not be of interest for them but of
capital importance for the real linguists?

KEEP IT THE WAY IT IS; this is democracy and pluralism; otherwise there
is favoritism. As the saying in Spanish goes, "o hay pa'todos, o hay
patadas!"

Prof. J. Diego Quesada
Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
Tel.: (416) 978-4751
Fax: (416) 971-2061
e-mail:dquesadaepas.utoronto.ca