#lingcomm21

[allthingslinguistic]

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

I like conferences, and I've made a lot of friends through them. 

I also like the internet, and I've made a lot of friends through it. 

And yet somehow, as conferences were pivoting to online in 2020, I was finding myself at a lot of online conferences where I wasn't even managing to catch up with my existing friends who I knew were also attending, let alone make new ones. Surely, we could do better. Let's start by taking a step back and thinking about what makes each of these formats great for meeting people. 

The conference format is great not because of the program alone but in the structure of the conference around the program — being in the audience of a talk together means that afterwards everyone knows that everyone else in the room has experienced the same material and it is therefore a relevant topic of conversation. A conference program is not about raw information transmission — frankly, a decent blog post or paper would probably be more efficient and accessible for simple info transfer. Instead, a conference program is about creating a "magic circle" — a structure that brings together for a focused amount of time a group of people who care about the topics in the program, and that provides springboards for conversations within that group.  

This emergent benefit of conferences is easy to overlook because it often happens at the margins, disguised by physical and logistical needs. Grabbing some people from the conference to go out for dinner, running into people from the conference at the hotel breakfast buffet, striking up a conversation in a registration lineup, staying in the conference city a day early or late to meet up with fellow attendees, proposing a meetup on twitter with other people from the conference hashtag — it's so much more than just the official post-plenary reception or networking hour. It took me several years to figure out how to "do" conferences effectively by creating more occasions like these because of how the "third place" aspects of conferences are so often neglected from the point of view of the official scheduling. (Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term "third place" points out that third places are often "shabby" and overlooked.) Not surprising then (disappointing but not surprising) that the social part of conferences is overlooked in the pivot to online. 

But, you could argue, maybe online is inherently unsuited to forming social connections? Wait, but like, hold on a sec. 

The internet is great because it allows people to find others who share their impossibly niche interests, dramatically reducing barriers to access, especially in terms of geography, cost, and findability. Although the internet doesn't remove all barriers (timezones, language, and access to devices are still relevant, for example), we now take it for granted that you can easily find other people talking about a book that's now out of print or stumble down a rabbit hole of an obscure musical genre that could never have gotten a mainstream record deal. People are willing to be real with each other in ways that matter: I have longtime internet friends where I know quite a few details about their mental health status even though I don't know, for example, how tall they are. Marvelling at the capacity for the internet to connect people with niche interests or secret feelings across geographical barriers is so utterly mundane now that it makes me sound like a nineties tech utopianist to even lay it out. But that doesn't mean it's not still real. 

With two such promising ingredients, it almost seems like the combination of online + conference should be better than an offline conference. What went so spectacularly wrong? And it's not just one lackluster event — why is an enjoyable online conference so difficult across the board? 

The problem is that in a physical conference, the social side comes essentially for free. Sure, there are things that organizers can do to enhance it, like providing food on site, designating ample breaks and social hours, choosing venues with well-positioned common areas to run into people and a good neighbourhood density of offsite food options, and communicating clearly about ancillary digital spaces like hashtags. But I've been to conferences that do none of these things (ahem, especially academic ones), and while it does make for an event that's unfriendly for first-timers, once you know a few people and a few conference-management tips, you can still hack the conference into a reasonable social experience. After all, you can still run into people in the lobby, hang back after a talk to chat with someone, or grab a few people to go to lunch with.  

Physical events come with decades and centuries of social infrastructure disguised as practical necessity and conference ritual that organizers have never really had to think about as social. Organizers put coffeebreaks in the schedule because every other conference they've been to has coffeebreaks and because of a vague assumption that people need caffeine, without considering the social benefits of giving people a reason to move around and shared objects to strike up conversations about. Imagine if every conference organizer also had to take on the architecture and interior design and urban planning of the conference space, and we can understand why the pivot to online conferences has gotten off to a rough start. 

The reason why virtual conferences are antisocial is that conference organizers aren't used to thinking of the social side as a core part of their jobs, because they didn't have to care about it as much offline. (It's not just conferences, by the way — this post from danah boyd makes many similar points about knitting together a healthy social fabric among students during online teaching rather than just having them hear from instructors in isolation, and I've also been greatly inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, which is about the principles that can make social gatherings of all genres effective and even transformative, and which I'd strongly encourage reading whether you're planning on hosting a conference or a birthday party. I'm just focusing on conferences here for simplicity.) 

So if we accept the premise that conference organizers have a social responsibility to their attendees, not just an informational responsibility to them, and that this responsibility is both more challenging and more important for online conferences, we're now left with a second question: how is this social responsibility to be accomplished? 

In the next post I'll talk about how I figured out a structure for a better online conference, the ideas from other people that I was inspired by, and the organizational team that put together a model online-first conference called LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, which we hope you can draw inspiration from. 

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts on subsequent Mondays, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out. 

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

[superlinguo]

Planning communication access for online conferences: A Research Whisperer post about LingComm21

The final post sharing our experience of running LingComm21 online is all about planning communication access and is available on the Research Whisperer. This is a piece that  I wrote with Gabrielle Hodge, who attended the conference. We talk about communication access, interpreting, live captions and auto captions. I appreciate that Gab shared her experience as a participant at LingComm as well. 

From the post:

Communication access is about ensuring people can bring their best to the event and for everyone to engage in all directions. We want our academic communities to reflect the same variation in lived experience and expertise as the rest of our lives. Planning for communication access should be the same as planning physical access or catering: you don’t wait until people turn up and tell you they’re hungry to plan catering for an event. Communication access should be built into every event, much like making sure accessible toilets are available, that everyone can get into the building and use facilities with ease and that there’s a range of food, not just egg sandwiches. Here are some common and easy-to-implement communication access options for you to engage with your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues.

You can read the full piece on The Research Whisperer blog.

The LingComm21 conference case study posts

This post is part of a 6 part series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

[vocalfriespod]

Jamaalapalooza Transcript

[Music] Carrie Gillon:              Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination! Megan Figueroa:         I’m Megan Figueroa. Carrie Gillon:              And I’m Carrie Gillon. We have two really fun announcements. The first one is that we’re part of LingComm21, which stands for the year. [Laughs] Megan Figueroa:         Perhaps you’re like, “Why is…

[allthingslinguistic]

February 2021: Announcing #LingComm21 and #lingfest

February 2021: Announcing #LingComm21 and #lingfest

This month, I announced LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-style coordination of independently organized public linguistics events, together with an excellent organizing committee consisting of Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, Laura Bailey, and Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), both to take place in April…

[allthingslinguistic]

Designing online conferences for building community: The case of #LingComm21

When I started trying to solve the problem of virtual conferences being so antisocial by designing a conference to be online-first from the ground up, I had three main inspirations: a tweet, a blog post, and a book. 

In January 2020, there was a twitter meme that read: "You've been given $10,000 a set of conference rooms, and a weekend. You've been instructed that you must hold "your name"-Con. What do you do? What does the event look like? Are there games? panels? speakers?" 

I posted a reply: 

Gretchen Con is obviously just getting a bunch of people together to nerd out about linguistics, like the fun bits of an academic conference (lots of lightning talks and roundtable discussions and "everyone who wants to talk about x go to this room")

...and then, well, the pandemic happened. We were all pretty distracted. 

But as conferences and events kept switching to virtual through 2020, I was noticing that most of them weren't replicating my favourite parts of conferences, the interactive parts, the parts that I'd wanted to replicate in my extremely hypothetical meme tweet. 

I started experimenting with holding various demo events in proximity chat spaces like Gather.town and Spatial.chat, and ultimately wrote an article for Wired about designing better virtual parties. Researching the article led me to reading a lot about social psychology findings that human conversation size naturally maxes out in fluid, changing configurations of around 4 people, much smaller than a typical Zoom social, and publishing it led me to the excellent book The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, a step-by-step guide to better gatherings primarily in physical space but which has many ideas that can be applied to virtual gatherings as well. 

I began thinking, what if we designed a conference to be virtual from the ground up? What would be different if we conceived of a virtual conference not as a simple vehicle to port the typical conference programming online, but as the chance to take advantage of the core social strengths within the overlap of conference and internet, as I talked about in the previous post — to create a magic circle, where people who share a particular interest get to interact with each other over a defined period of time? 

I came up with three principles of what makes an online conference different from an offline one: 

1. An online-first conference can be more niche. A physical conference needs to appeal to a sufficient number of people who are interested in a particular topic, who also live within a sufficient radius and/or have sufficient income/support/visas to make travel reasonable. Many physical conferences that pivoted to online for the pandemic found that their registration numbers increased by 1.5x to 2x, which points to how many people are excluded by physical conference travel. But this also means that an online-first conference can be about a topic that's so niche it wouldn't necessarily have been viable as a standalone physical conference at all, such as something that might have been a small meetup or workshop at a larger conference. 

2. An online-first conference doesn't require as much upfront commitment. Physical conferences need to reserve a venue of a particular size before they even know how many tickets will sell, as well as needing to consider issues like catering and staffing. An online conference can in theory be run much more cheaply and flexibly, and is thus easier for first-time conference-runners (like me) who have a niche idea to make happen. (Though cheaper to run doesn't mean entirely free; we'll see in a later post that livecaptioning, livestreaming, and proximity chat platforms all incur costs, even if one doesn't count the labour of conference organizers.) 

3. An online-first conference can be more innovative. Physical conferences that move online are beholden to the expectations of the attendees from previous years, expectations which may not map particularly well onto an online domain. A new online-first conference can set an entirely new pattern, potentially providing a model for useful features to be added onto other kinds of events as well. 

One of Priya Parker's core ideas in the Art of Gathering is that every gathering needs a purpose. Since online gatherings can support topics that are more niche than physical events, and since I was missing the conversations about linguistics communication that I normally have around the margins of physical conferences (and suspected that other people would be too), I got together a small committee of people to run the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, an online-first conference with the purpose of building a community of people who are doing linguistics communication. 

My hypothesis, which I first tested by recruiting the fantastic organizing team of co-chair Lauren Gawne, committee members Jessi Grieser and Laura Bailey, and conference manager Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), was that there were enough people interested in lingcomm to form a decent-sized small conference, maybe up to 100 people. 

We formed this hypothesis based largely on personal connections: we've all had conversations with people about lingcomm at the larger academic linguistics conferences we've attended, covering various catchment areas as we're based in four different countries. As non-academics, Liz and I had also encountered people interested in lingcomm who didn't typically attend academic conferences, especially in conjunction with scicomm, and from running the LingComm Grants the previous year, Lauren and I knew that announcing things on Lingthusiasm and our own social media was a viable way of reaching budding lingcommers from around the world. 

By building a community of lingcommers at a virtual conference, we hoped to demonstrate two things: 

There is significant interest in lingcomm at a global level, helping lingcomm practitioners learn from each other and feel less isolated 

Effective community-building through online conferences is possible, and this conference and surrounding materials (such as this series of blog posts!) can serve as resources for people with other interests who want to create online events for other communities  

The way that we proposed to accomplish this purpose was inspired by both the Art of Gathering, as I've already mentioned, and an extremely good blog post by Em Lazer-Walker, Using game design to make virtual events more social, which contains a description of conferences as a magic circle, as well as this memorable application of the sociology of friendship to conference design:  

friendships are formed through repeated spontaneous interactions over time.

This model reinforces some design decisions I've already explained: if you want spontaneous interactions, that seemingly requires a more spatial chat model than a giant Discord server where everybody is always in the same chat rooms at the same time.

From there, adding game-like and playful activities to the space can encourage these moments of spontaneous interaction to happen more frequently.

Similarly, The Art of Gathering described how Parker built community at a conference where attendees from different groups were encountering each other for the first time by seating audience members at small group tables and then encouraging them to get up and move to a different table after each talk. Regular mixing promoted not just befriending the few people that attendees happened to sit next to at the beginning, but a broader sense of community as a whole. 

Accomplishing our community-building goal for LingComm21 thus required two key ingredients: first, a conference platform that let attendees participate in self-directed, small-group conversations with a variety of different people, and second, a conference schedule that encouraged people to actually have these small-group conversations (and bond about our topic of interest in particular). 

Here's a preview of the end: judging from people's responses on social media and our exit survey, we succeeded at our goals of building community around lingcomm and creating a model conference. 

in a way this is really obvious, but wow, virtual conferences are SO much better when they're organized and attended by people who believe that virtual conferences can be good

#LingComm21 was hands-down the best digital conference experience I’ve had; this thread does a great job explaining why

#LingComm21 has been an amazing conference so far, and while everyone has been sharing screenshots of the amazing digital space the organisation team has created for us, I also want to reflect on why this works so well for me and how our next online conferences can look like [thread]

In the following posts, collaboratively written with organizing committee members Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, we’ll walk through the design ingredients that we used to create this experience of community both on the scheduling side and on the platform side. 

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts during upcoming weeks, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out. 

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

[allthingslinguistic]

The fourth post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we designed the virtual space in Gather for LingComm21 to foster interaction and small-group conversation. Here are a few highlights: 

Give people pretexts to spend time in the virtual space. While the session rooms themselves were mostly business, we added fun interactive details to the social spaces. The unexpected hit of the conference was the “magical duck” that dispensed emojis of snacks or dinosaurs, a fork of a Glitch bot by Alison Stevens that was inspired by an “emoji bar” created by Em Lazer-Walker. There were other Glitch bots, as well, largely inspired by the Gather Glitch bots by Janelle Shane, as well as Gather’s default interactive piano and whiteboard objects. Each day we added a new interactive experience or two so there was always something to discover. These “Easter eggs” motivated people to join early or wander around the space to find things, and sometimes served as convenient conversation starters (“have you gotten a snack from the duck yet?”). For one day, the cafe space was transformed into a “cat cafe” that included several images of cats (including a foreground image so that people could sit “under” the cat) as well as a livestream of kittens, which some people “stood around” watching for some time, thus allowing others to run into them organically. There are many great nature livestreams available on YouTube, and we think that they can be a great solution to the “cheese plate problem” of giving people objects of recurring interestingness to interact around. 

It’s about the space, but it’s not about the space. Could we have made the Gather space more aesthetically attractive and with even more interactive Easter eggs? Yes. Would doing so have actually made more people use it, or the existing people gain more utility out of it? Probably not. It’s easy to attribute the success of the conference to the Gather space itself, but we’ve seen beautifully designed Gather spaces languish unused when more attention was paid to spatial design rather than temporal design — i.e., providing more and more elaborate rooms and pixel art rather than coming up with events and occasions and programming as a reason for people to keep coming back. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the architecture is in a community center without a calendar of events that provides reasons for people to drop by the community center regularly (and even a shabby building can be much beloved if it hosts warm and welcoming events), and the same thing is true in a virtual space.

Building elaborate spaces in Gather can be a fun hobby — it appeals to the same parts of our brains that like Lego and Minecraft and The Sims. But if you want other people to actually use your space beyond the initial tour, you need to know where to cut yourself off on the architecture side and direct the bulk of your energy to the people side, prioritizing ease of navigation over esoteric Easter eggs, and especially focusing on events and activities that give people a reason to come and get them actually interacting with each other. Yes, it’s scarier to reach out and invite real living people on the other side of the screen than it is to fuss with virtual furniture solo. But anyone who’s worth being friends with won’t mind if you invite them to your home when it’s still a bit messy, and your digital space doesn’t have to be pixel-perfect, either. In fact, for smaller groups we’ve found that embracing chaos and inviting your guests to help decorate the space with you can be a fun activity!

Read the full post.

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts during upcoming weeks, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

[allthingslinguistic]

The third post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we created the schedule for LingComm21 to integrate socialization and be reasonably timezone-friendly. Here are a few highlights: 

Make the conference a shared experience, not solo homework. When people don’t have to travel for a conference, there’s sometimes a temptation to spread conference events across an entire month, or to assign conference homework of watching talks in advance, which makes it difficult for people to have a shared joint conference experience as an event that’s bounded in time. Pre-recorded talks and/or allowing talks to remain available after the conference may make sense for some conferences, but we’ve observed that watching talks as homework plus a live Q&A part often leads to live Q&A audiences who haven’t watched the talks, making presenters either deliver a short recap of the talk or else suffer in silence, and in any case not accomplishing our goals for this conference of encouraging participants to interact. Instead, we debuted each talk as a live presentation with live breakout groups and Q&A, and recorded only the larger sessions, which were available to attendees for a week following the conference (but not forever, to encourage more candid conversation). Some attendees who were in less convenient time zones reported watching the recorded talks before the next day of programming began, so this limited amount of time shifting helped us give attendees a shared conference experience without creating homework.

Make it possible for people to fit the event into their lives. As a new, fully virtual conference, we expected that it would be difficult to convince people to set aside entire days for this event. Additionally, we were hoping for synchronous participation from people in many areas of the world, and we knew that longer days would make this more challenging. We settled on a schedule of 4 days of 4-hour conference blocks, beginning each day at 20:00 UTC. [...]

Build interpersonal interaction into the experience. We had noticed that in many virtual conference environments, socializing and networking were, at best, easily avoidable add-ons. Because facilitating communication among this community was one of our primary goals, we instead made these central parts of the conference-going experience. In most of our session rooms, people “sat” at tables with others, rather than in rows of chairs. Sessions in these rooms included 20 minutes of panel discussion, 10 minutes of small breakout discussions, where people chatted with others at their tables about questions posed by the session’s panelists, and then 10 minutes of questions to the panel again. These breakout tables were self-chosen, rather than randomly assigned, meaning that people could choose to sit at a table where they already knew someone, choose to keep mixing it up, or even move to a different table midway through a session. 

Read the full post.

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts during upcoming weeks, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

[superlinguo]

International Conference on Linguistics Communication (LingComm21)

I am so excited to share the International Conference on Linguistics Communication, happening online the week of April 19-23, 2021. The conference will be made up of moderated panels and poster presentations about lingcomm projects. 

Conference website: https://lingcomm.org/conference/

Speaker/poster submission: https://lingcomm.org/conference/participate (submissions close March 19, 2021)

Registration: via EventBrite

We’ve kept registration as low as possible, and the plenary workshop stream will be live captioned in English.

If you’re more interested in enjoying good lingcomm than making it, stay tuned for LingFest, coming the lat week of April: https://lingcomm.org/lingfest

From the LingComm21 conference website:

The International Conference on Linguistics Communication (LingComm21) brings together lingcommers from a variety of backgrounds, including linguists who have developed skills in communicating with public audiences and communicators who have developed a “beat” related to language.

Taking advantage of a digital-first format to bring together lingcommers from around the world, LingComm21 is a small, highly interactive conference containing a mix of beginner and advanced panels on specific areas of lingcomm, as well as smaller special sessions emerging from the shared interests of attendees. Tell us which topics you can speak to, and we’ll match you with co-panelists who share your interests.

Confirmed invited speakers (so far):

Kate Burridge, Monash University

Nicole Holliday, University of Pennsylvania

Ben Zimmer, The Wall Street Journal

Megan Figueroa and Carrie Gillon, Vocal Fries

Lane Greene, The Economist

Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl

Daniel Midgely, Because Language

Grant Barrett, A Way with Words

Helen Zaltzman, The Allusionist

Kory Stamper, Word by Word

Dates: For much of the world, the conference will run April 19-22, in a single four-hour block each day beginning at UTC 20:00. That’s beginning at 10am in Honolulu, 1pm in Seattle, 4pm in Montreal, 9pm in London, and 10pm in Paris. For those on the leading edge of time zones, the conference will run April 20-23, beginning at 6am in Melbourne and 8am in Auckland.

Platform: The conference will be held in a custom space on Gather, a proximity chat platform which lets participants wander around and chat with in spontaneous small groups between sessions, and which includes a virtual coffeeshop and pub for off-hours and informal meetups.

Organising committee: Laura Bailey, Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, and Gretchen McCulloch make up LingComm21’s steering committee. Elizabeth McCullough is the conference manager.

For more information visit the LingComm21 conference website: https://lingcomm.org/conference/

[allthingslinguistic]

The fifth post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we budgeted for LingComm21 and what other virtual events might want to take into consideration. Here are a few highlights:

Accessibility costs Although not all possible accessibility needs can be foreseen by conference organizers, and we did have a slot on the registration/participation forms asking about other accessibility requirements, the inaccessibility of audio content is extremely well known and formed part of our planning from the beginning.

Because LingComm21 was conducted primarily in English, and involved an international community that spans many linguistic areas, we decided on live captioning for the event, rather than interpreting for a specific signed language or several signed languages. Captions also provide an ancillary benefit for attendees who are hard of hearing, have auditory processing difficulties, or who speak English as a second language, in addition to providing a written reference for the organizers after the event. We had live captioning for 11 sessions throughout the conference, including all the introductory and plenary sessions. This cost around $5000 USD and constituted the single biggest expense for the LingComm21 conference.

We contacted captioning services for a quote as we were still figuring out the structure of the conference, which allowed us to reduce captioning costs by building in breaks for both the captioner and conference participants, meaning that we did not have to pay a second captioner to work in shifts to cover overly-long sessions (and also providing social benefits for participants as detailed in other posts). Reserving captioners early in the planning stages also allowed us to announce that captioning would be provided from the initial advertisement of the conference, rather than waiting for people to request it or invisibly assume that they were not welcome. Around 10% of participants who did the feedback survey said they used the captions, and the majority of the remaining 90% said that although they didn’t personally use them, they were happy to see them there, even though we didn’t solicit this information. (What can we say, the lingcomm community is pretty great.) 

Read the full post.

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts during upcoming weeks, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

[allthingslinguistic]

Closing remarks for #LingComm21

I’m delighted to have co-organized LingComm21 last week, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication. Here is the (lightly edited) text of the opening remarks I gave after the final panel.

Hello lingcommers! It's only been three days, and I haven't left my apartment, and yet I feel like I've been somewhere. You know, I was tempted to make this feel like the real conference experience by getting some coffee and muffins and leaving them out overnight to get stale before I eat them. Or maybe letting my phone run out of battery and sitting on the floor next to an outlet in the wall so I could charge it Okay, I didn't do that. But in the end, I still feel like I had a real conference experience. I got to wander around from poster to poster and find out about so many cool projects, I got to introduce people to each other and send other people to find each other because they had similar interests. I got to scroll through the livetweet and the instagram hashtag afterwards when I was thoroughly exhausted and like a whole bunch of posts. I got to hang out in the cafe before talks and the bar after them and chat with people. I mean, the cafe now has cats in it, and this has never happened to me at a physical conference BUT NOW I THINK IT SHOULD. And like any real conference, I have some people to thank: Captioners - Maggie and Tess from White Coat Captioning Sponsors - the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Wordnik, and our 12 personal sponsors who helped us keep the registration fees low while being able to afford captioning. And especially to the patrons of Lingthusiasm, who enabled us to underwrite the setup costs of this conference, such as the deposit on captioning, before we had any idea whether anyone would be interested in attending.  Volunteers - our 10 excellent volunteers from many different countries, who greeted you at the door on the first day and were available for questions throughout the conference Panelists, poster presenters, moderators, and people who organized meetups, who made the body of the conference happen by giving you things to show up for!   Organizing committee - Laura Bailey, Jessi Grieser, and especially my co-chair Lauren Gawne, who figured out the structure and programming for this conference   Conference manager - Liz McCullough, who not only sent you tons of emails and created this fantastic gather space, but also took care of innumerable tiny and last minute details that made this whole event run smoothly Speaking of event running, I want to call your attention particularly to the meetup in the first slot tomorrow about the future of this lingcomm conference - is this a thing that you'd like to see happen again? It does take work to run but it's also been incredibly rewarding, so if that's something you'd be interested in being involved in, please come to that meetup or send us an email and we can begin that conversation. We've been taking a lot of notes on what we've learned from this year and we'd be very happy to pass those along to a new team. For this year, I hope that you've had the relief of being understood, of being around other people who also care about linguistics communication, that people have gone from avatars you maybe recognized from social media into avatars you literally "bumped" into, and from strangers into maybe the seeds of friends. The panelists said in the closing panel a few minutes ago that this is a community - I promise I didn’t even tell them to say that - and I hope that this feeling of community is something you can bring with you.  The formal programming ends today, but hopefully for lingcomm this is the beginning of a new era, an era of deepening the collaborations and the relationships with each other, of occasionally looking inward to this community so that we can look outward again to all of the lingcomm we're doing with our existing communities with renewed vigour.  So I'll say not goodbye but I'll see you again, whether around in Gather later this evening, at the meetup day, or in the coming weeks and months on social media.

Previous speeches about lingcomm: opening remarks for LingComm21, on receiving the LSA’s Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award.

[allthingslinguistic]

March 2021: LingComm21 preparations and two video talks

March 2021: LingComm21 preparations and two video talks

This month was largely occupied in continued preparations for a pair of events in April: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, including calls for participation and creating the program schedule.LingFest, a fringe-festival-style coordination of independently organized public linguistics events, announcing the first list of events including a Lingthusiasm…

[allthingslinguistic]

June 2021: texting periods, LingComm21 meta posts, and finally a new bookshelf!

June 2021: texting periods, LingComm21 meta posts, and finally a new bookshelf!

I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period. Now that Because Internet has been out for two years, I can attest that people have successfully used it as a way of opening up cross-generational conversations about changing texting norms. Gretchen McCulloch, the Canadian linguist and author of “Because Internet,” dedicated an entire chapter of her book to…

[allthingslinguistic]

Opening remarks for #LingComm21

I’m delighted to be co-organizing LingComm21 this week, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication. Here is the (lightly edited) text of the opening remarks I gave before the first panel yesterday. 

Hello! Welcome to LingComm21! When I started doing lingcomm, I had a ritual I would do. I would count on my hand how many other people I knew who were doing something similar. And -- I managed to get through the first hand fairly easily, but I had a hard time getting through the second one. Even at the time, I was missing people. A lot of us start doing lingcomm in response to a need in our own corners of the world, and it's being visibly doing some sort of lingcomm that helps us meet other people who are doing similar things gradually along the way. Many of us are a sort of bridge between two worlds, the person who explains linguistics to some part of the public -- and also the person who explains the public to certain linguists. But being a bridge can be isolating. Even more so in an isolating time.  During a year when conferences have been moving online, a year in which I've attended both academic linguistics conferences and science communication, scicomm, conferences -- I started dreaming about the conference I really wanted, the conference that would bring together people who cared about both sides simultaneously. I was very pleased that our fantastic organizing committee agreed to help make this happen - Lauren Gawne, Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), Jessi Grieser, and Laura Bailey - and even more pleased and astonished that this little conference, which we'd hoped might even reach a hundred attendees, actually has 200 registrants. Look around you and see how many people are excited about linguistics communication! You can't count them on your hands! I'm extremely excited to officially welcome you all to the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication! Thank you all for coming, and a special thank you to everyone who had to adjust their sleep and other schedules in order to be here.   We have some fantastic programming lined up for the next few days, and even more importantly, we want to provide as many opportunities as possible for you to meet each other, make friends, share tips, maybe even do a bit of griping about the challenges you share! So, a few notes about the Gather space you're already in! This space is open for you for the entire conference - if you want to pop by early for coffee, stay late by the bar, or arrange to meet someone on the boardwalk at a convenient window for your timezones, it's here for you to use! Virtual spaces are a new social dynamic, so you might wonder how you can know whether it's an appropriate time to approach someone! One suggestion is to use the "wave" option in the bottom centre bar when you get near a person or group - if they wave back, they've noticed you, if they don't then maybe they're concentrating hard on the conversation they're already in. If you really want to have a small conversation, you can also pick one of the smaller private spaces to have it in.   Gather is better with smaller conversations, so don't treat it like Zoom, if a group gets bigger than five or six or so it's a good idea to split up into smaller conversations! Because we're all massive linguistics dorks here, may I suggest just saying something like "hey, we're above the maximum optimal conversation size! Wanna split up?" I've always found the conversations I have in hallways during conferences are just as important as the official programming. So if the scheduled events at a particular time aren't exactly your cup of tea, you can also feel free to bring your own beverage to the cafe or wherever and chat with whoever's there. Also, the final day of programming is entirely a meetup day -- I see people have already been putting in meetups in the document and please keep doing that! If we run out of rooms in the spreadsheet we can designate smaller zones within existing rooms so do fill it up! Finally, a housekeeping note: If you want to show the LingComm conference space in Gather to someone else who's not at this conference (perhaps for inspiration for a different event), we'll be having an open house show and tell in a few weeks -- keep an eye on your email (and this blog) for details. For the moment, we have a cap on the number of people who will fit in this space, so please keep any show and tells till after the conference.   By the way, if you're having any tech glitches or other questions or concerns, keep an eye out for the volunteers with the sparkle emoji in their usernames -- there should always be at least one at the information desks where you came in, and sometimes you'll also see them wandering around! And with that, I'll hand it over to Laura Bailey for the first panel: “Why lingcomm” with Ben Zimmer, Kate Burridge, and Raquel Freitag! 

Previous speeches about lingcomm: on receiving the LSA’s Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award. 

[superlinguo]

LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social (blog post series)

In April 2021 I was part of the organising committee for the International Conference on Linguistics Communication (LingComm21). In putting togehter this conference we learnt a lot about running online events, and condensed everything we learnt into a series of blog posts. Some of these posts were written by Gretchen on the All Things Linguistic blog, and the others were posted on the LingComm website. Below I link to each post with a short paragraph of content.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Physical events come with decades and centuries of social infrastructure disguised as practical necessity and conference ritual that organizers have never really had to think about as social. Organizers put coffeebreaks in the schedule because every other conference they’ve been to has coffeebreaks and because of a vague assumption that people need caffeine, without considering the social benefits of giving people a reason to move around and shared objects to strike up conversations about. Imagine if every conference organizer also had to take on the architecture and interior design and urban planning of the conference space, and we can understand why the pivot to online conferences has gotten off to a rough start.

Designing online conferences for building community

Physical conferences that move online are beholden to the expectations of the attendees from previous years, expectations which may not map particularly well onto an online domain. A new online-first conference can set an entirely new pattern, potentially providing a model for useful features to be added onto other kinds of events as well.

Scheduling online conferences for building community

When people don’t have to travel for a conference, there’s sometimes a temptation to spread conference events across an entire month, or to assign conference homework of watching talks in advance, which makes it difficult for people to have a shared joint conference experience as an event that’s bounded in time. Pre-recorded talks and/or allowing talks to remain available after the conference may make sense for some conferences, but we’ve observed that watching talks as homework plus a live Q&A part often leads to live Q&A audiences who haven’t watched the talks, making presenters either deliver a short recap of the talk or else suffer in silence, and in any case not accomplishing our goals for this conference of encouraging participants to interact. Instead, we debuted each talk as a live presentation with live breakout groups and Q&A, and recorded only the larger sessions, which were available to attendees for a week following the conference (but not forever, to encourage more candid conversation).

Hosting online conferences for building community

We wanted attending this event to be as simple as walking into a conference center and being handed a paper program, rather than regularly leaving the conference platform to check on an informational email, to view a separate video feed, and so on. In addition to being frustrating technologically, frequent program-surfing would increase the number of potential distractions each attendee might face. Thus, as much as possible, we embedded things within Gather, including the programming schedule, the editable list of meetups, and video feeds of larger panel sessions. The physicality of the schedule, meetups, and intros documents also gave people an object of joint attention to use as an excuse to move around the space and interact with fellow attendees.

Budgeting online conferences or events

Physical conference budgets are massive, and that’s even taking into account that the conferences outsource most of the costs of travel, accommodation and feeding people to the participants. People are used to getting things for free on the internet, and online conferences are much, much more financially accessible than physical events, but for a good conference to be run well, people should expect there to be some cost.

To keep up to date with LingComm news you can subscribe to the LingComm feed or follow LingComm on Twitter.

[superlinguo]

Superlinguo 2022 in review

At the start of 2022 it was my aim to move gently through this year, after the general global upheaval the pandemic brought, and settling back into work after parental leave. I mostly think managed that for myself, and things worth sharing still happened this year.

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm turned 6 this year. As well as regular episodes and bonus episodes every month, this year we ran a special offer for patrons and did a one-off print run of lens cloths with our redesigned aesthetic IPA.

Main episodes

Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions (transcript)

Who questions the questions? (transcript)

The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory (transcript)

What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd (transcript)

Various vocal fold vibes (transcript)

Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko (transcript)

What we can, must, and should say about modals (transcript)

Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages (transcript)

What it means for a language to be official (transcript)

Word order, we love (transcript)

Knowledge is power, copulas are fun (transcript)

Making speech visible with spectrograms (transcript)

Bonus episodes

Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

103 ways for kids to learn languages

Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough

Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox

Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science

Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

There’s like, so much to like about “like”

What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow

Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular

Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics

Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference

LingComm: 2022 grants and conference posts

This year we ran another round of LingComm Grants, and we’ve been enjoying seeing new linguistic communication projects come to life. We also published summaries of top tips from plenary panels of the 2021 LingComm conference, and I teamed up with Gabrielle Hodge to write about how to plan communication access for online conferences. The LingComm conference will be back in 2023!

Tips for LingComm series

Planning communication access for online conferences: A Research Whisperer post about LingComm21

LingComm23 conference (February 2023)

2022 LingComm Grantees: New linguistics projects for you to follow

Top Superlinguo posts in 2022

Superlinguo remains a place where I can test out ideas or share things that aren’t necessarily the shape of an academic publication. I also continued my slow series of posts about linguistics books for kids, with a gem from 1966!

General posts

Superlinguo turns 11!

New Superlinguo Welcome page

Linguistics books for kids: How You Talk

Long form blog posts

Notes and observations about air quote gestures

Fictional gestures in scifi and fantasy

Information and advice

Doing your own Linguistics Job Interviews

Planning communication access for online conferences: A Research Whisperer post about LingComm21

Managing Breakout Rooms in online Tutorials and Workshops

Adopting the Trømso Recommendations in academic publishing

Linguistics Job Interviews

In 2022 the Linguistics Job Interviews series was edited by Martha Tsutsui-Bilins. After 8 years and 80+ interviews, the regular monthly series is coming to an end. There were 12 new interviews this year: 

Interview with a  Director of Conversation Design

Interview with an Artist

Interview with a Research Scientist

Interview with a Language Engineer

Interview with a Data Manager & Digital Archivist

Interview with a Natural Language Annotation Lead

Interview with an EMLS/Linguistics instructor & mother of four

Interview with a Performing Artiste and Freelance Editor

Interview with a Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host

Interview with a Customer Success Manager

Interview with an Impact Lead

Interview with an Online Linguistics Teacher

Regular interviews may have ended, but I’ll have more on linguistics, jobs and careers in 2023. I also wrote this post about doing your own Linguistics Job Interviews, to encourage other people to share their stories or interview others about their experiences.

Academic articles in 2022

This year I had two academic articles published. I also published one academic review of a monograph:

Gawne, L. & S. Styles. 2022. Situating linguistics in the social science data movement. In A.L. Berez-Kroeker, B. McDonnell, E. Koller & L.B. Collister (Eds), The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, 9-25. MIT Press. [Open Access PDF][Superlinguo summary]

Gawne, L. & T. Owen-Smith. 2022. The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang. Studies in Language. Issue number forthcoming doi: 10.1075/sl.21049.gaw [published version][Green OA version][blog summary]

Gawne, L. 2022. Review of Repetitions in Gesture by Jana Bressem. The Linguist List. [HTML]

The year ahead

I will be on parental leave in 2023 🎉

Last time I went on leave with a newborn I had no idea if I would have a job to return to. I’m very grateful to not have that stress hanging over me this time around. Lingthusiasm will continue as regularly scheduled. It will be interesting to see how things here go without the monthly job interview posts. I’ll still have new publications, and various linguistics resources and observations to share, if maybe on a less than weekly basis. You can always follow Superlinguo on Tumblr @superlinguo), join the mailing list (in the sidebar), go retro and use the RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter (@superlinguo)

Previous years

Superlinguo 2021 in review

Superlinguo 2020 in review

Superlinguo 2020 (2019 in review)

Superlinguo 2019 (2018 in review)

Superlinguo 2018 (2017 in review)

Superlinguo 2017 (2016 in review)

Superlinguo 2015 highlights

[allthingslinguistic]

What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm: Opening keynote of #LingComm23

I was honoured to be invited to give the opening plenary talk of LingComm23, the second International Conference on Linguistics Communication. This is an edited version of my remarks. 

Thank you Laura for that introduction. 

When I first had the idea for what if there was a whole conference about communicating linguistics to broader audiences, a conference that took advantage of the pivot to online that happened during the covid-19 pandemic, to bring together that one panel that sometimes happens about linguistic topics at conferences serving broader audiences and that one panel that sometimes happens about engaging the public at linguistics conferences. To bring together all these people who are interested in lingcomm into a bigger conversation, into many panels and chances for people to meet. To take these conversations that happen at the margins and make them the focus of a whole event. To create a space where, for once, we didn't have to justify why lingcomm needs to exist in the first place, WHY it's important and interesting and exciting for people to have access to accurate information about the linguistic world around them, and we could instead get on with more of the doing, figuring out HOW to make this vital lingcomm work flourish in the world. 

When I first had this idea, in 2020, I was excited enough that the organizing committee of Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, Laura Bailey, and Liz McCullough (no relation) were willing to get on board. I was excited enough that people were willing to give yet another online event a chance in 2021 after a year of lockdowns and too much Zoom. I was excited enough that over a hundred people came and talked with each other and held panels and posters and meetups, that I met people from around the world and had deeper conversations with the people I already knew. I was excited enough that on the last day of LingComm21, people resoundingly told me that we wanted this energy and this community to continue to exist. 

But now, now that the LingComm conference is back, now that I'm not even on the organizing committee, now that I don't even know what all's on the program because I didn't make it! Now that this project has been taking on a life of its own beyond any one individual person, beyond me — now I'm not just excited enough. I'm overjoyed. 

So when the organizing committee asked me to give this opening keynote, I started reflecting on what sort of effects can happen from a big talk in front of a whole bunch of people? What sort of things happen when someone gets in front of a big room and says, hey, this is important, these are the sorts of things that we could be collectively caring about? 

And I started thinking about a plenary talk that I went to almost exactly ten years ago, in early 2013, at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Boston, in the US. And this talk was by a linguist named David Pesetsky, and David Pesetsky spent his forty-five minutes in front of a big room of academic linguists saying in various ways, hey, what if people knew more things about linguistics, wouldn't that be great, wouldn't that be a world we all want to live in? 

I remember this talk so vividly not just because of what David said, but because of the effect that it had on me. Now, I'm a grad student at this point, this is my very first LSA, I'd spent a lot of time during this conference wandering the hallways amid giant scary crowds of unfamiliar people. But this talk made me feel like I belonged, that the field of linguistics wanted me and needed me. 

You see, I was a grad student who had a blog. I had a blog which was under a pseudonym, which my advisers didn't know about, and which had eight hundred followers. Eight hundred whole people, most of whom I didn't know, who'd signed up to learn about linguistics from me! This was SO MANY people. I was awestruck by the responsibility. 

So when David said that the public needed to know more linguistics, I sat bolt upright in the audience. That's me! I have a public! I'm reaching people! Me with my eight hundred followers on tumblr, I'm doing this! I'm trembling, I'm on fire, I'm shaking with nerves and excitement and adrenaline. 

And so I go up, fired up with my adrenaline and my eight hundred followers, I go up to David at the front of the room after the talk. And I remember that's how I first met Arika Okrent, who'd also gone up to talk with him afterward, and she'd just published her first lingcomm book, In The Land of Invented Languages, and so she was therefore VERY fancy to me.

After that talk, David said to us, to me and Arika, that he could trace trends in people coming into his intro linguistics classes having already heard of linguistics based on the years that pop linguistic books had come out. And this made sense to me because it was also a pop ling book that first got me into linguistics, that made me want to take a linguistics class, but this was my first time seeing it as part of a bigger picture, seeing how all the individual items of lingcomm feed into a bigger ecosystem, where a book makes a high school student decide to take a class, or a class they took many years ago makes an editor decide to green-light an article, or an article makes a grant reviewer decide to fund a grant. 

And I thought THAT, that's what I want, that's the sort of impact I want to have on the world. That's the sort of thing I want to look back in 30 years and say I contributed to. 

A keynote? A keynote can make someone think about their dreams, about their 30 year plans on the horizon. 

So this keynote is your moment to dream big about lingcomm. Elsewhere in the conference there are going to be all sorts of fantastic talks and panels and posters and art and meetups about the specific things people are doing and how you might do something similar. And I'm incredibly excited for them. But this is your moment to think, if time and money were no object, if you didn't have to do it all alone, what do you hope people know about language in 30 years? Who do you hope knows these things? 

I'm serious about this, I'm serious about putting eccentric interactive components in my talks, especially online. So I want you to take a moment right now and write something down, you can follow the link that's being displayed on your screens to a google doc and write them down together or you can just grab a pen and a scrap of paper, pull up the notes app on your phone, and write it down privately for yourself. 

1. What do you hope people know about linguistics in 30 years? 2. Who do you wish knew these things? 

Everybody got the doc? Oh I see lots of anonymous animals typing, that's great. (pause) I love all your energy. And if you see someone has put something and you want to second them, you can add a plus sign + beside it. (longer pause) Okay, we're going to do one more minute, make sure you also get to the second question if you haven't yet, it's slipped on the the next page. 

[About 5 minutes total until typing pace slows down, most people seem to have used the google doc] 

I love how much energy people had in the document, this bodes so well for the rest of the conference that you all jumped in and started writing immediately.. 

Okay,  hi, hello, let's come back in. Everyone feeling a bit fired up? Some of the people that you want to reach include high school students, policymakers, teachers, parents, speech pathologists, people whose language is marginalized, journalists, writers, editors, your families. These are all super great groups of people to wish knew more about linguistics. 

I want to tell a second half of this story. So, in January 2013, after I went to the LSA annual meeting and I hear this keynote and I'm in the audience and I'm getting all fired up with my 30 year vision. My, I want to be very clear about this, my pretty incoherent vision, but nonetheless my sense of urgency, that I with my 800 followers was reaching people who were interested in linguistics. That I could keep reaching them, and maybe even reach some more people, and help feed their interest in language. 

So I'm heading back from Boston home to Montreal, and as it happens I'm carpooling with a couple friends of mine, also linguistics grad students. And they were also at this keynote, and they're also a bit fired up, and we start talking in the car about what else we could do, to feed people's interest in linguistics and help get them accurate materials that they could understand. 

And we come up with a plan. We're going to make a website, and this website is going to have all sorts of excellent information on it, and it's going to be well organized, and it's going to be accessibly written, and it's going to be beautifully laid out, and it's going to be in the perfect font —  

— and then we spent three months bogged down in a discussion about which font to choose and the website never got off the ground. 

I'm not kidding. We're all pretty embarrassed about it now actually. This is why I'm not naming my friends' names, but like, I was just as much at fault here. 

But in the meantime, as we were lovingly hand-coding every pixel of this website (no no, we couldn't possibly just use a decent template from somewhere) and very politely fighting about fonts, we were doing something else, something which was actually sorta helpful...at least to a handful of people. 

Cause like, we'd also decided, as this perfect, amazing website was being designed, that we'd also pilot some very preliminary, rough versions of some of the material that we wanted to put onto it as blog posts, on my blog, All Things Linguistic, which already existed. You know, 800 followers. 

And this series, which we called the protolinguist series, was longer and more involved than anything I had posted previously, it was sort of these long linkposts with links to all sorts of things that we could find already online about various subfields of linguistics. 

You can look them up if you're curious, they're still there. And there's some stuff that I'd change about them if I was doing something like that now, for one thing I don't really think that a post with like a hundred links is a particularly effective resource, because people actually find it overwhelming to have that many links at once, and they don't click on most of them. 

But at the very least there were some people on tumblr who liked them, and who would reblog them and link other people to them, and I picked up a few more followers this way and I began to have a sense of myself more as creating resources for people and helping people in a more directed sense. 

And in the long run, we never launched the beautiful, perfect website, and these particular friends got busy with grad school. But by the end of that same year, I had written my first two lingcomm pieces for money, for Grammar Girl and for The Toast, while I was finishing my masters. And I'd decided that for at least the first few months of the next year, while I was recovering from academia, I could give this freelance writing thing a try. 

But I'd still learned a lot from trying to make a project. From trying to make two projects, this magical, fairytale website and my unglamorous blog that actually existed. And especially what I learned is that it's really useful to build up your projects in small steps. 

All Things Linguistic worked as an early project because I picked a platform I already had some understanding of (you need to understand, tumblr was cool in 2012), and it worked as a place where I could test out various styles of writing and engagement, from linkposts to articles to memes, and see how people reacted to various things. There was a community of people who were checking the linguistics tag on tumblr at the time, and I was following some of the people posting in it (like Lauren Gawne's blog superlinguo), so I was able to pick up followers because I was participating in a community. I used a free theme, just picked a colour and made an icon that was literally a screencap from a word doc, I set the whole thing up AND made my first couple short posts all in a single evening. Heck I didn't even spend the twelve dollars on the domain name, allthingslinguistic dot com until like a year later, remember I was a broke grad student, I didn't have any money.  

This magical, amazing, stupendous website didn't get off the ground because it was too magical. We wanted it to be too perfect. Even if we hadn't spent three months discussing fonts, even if we'd managed to release it on the world...what then? We didn't really have a plan for how the world was going to find out about this gorgeous, perfect website we'd made for them - I guess we figured I'd blog about it? But like, there was no reason to expect that it would be more popular than my other blog posts, and like, the thing that made people like the blog was having lots of shorter blog posts mixed in with the other gifs and memes and fun weird stuff on their tumblr feeds. So now, I'm pretty sure that after that one announcement blog post, our magical website would have just sort of... fizzled. We didn't have a plan for how people would find it or engage with it. And we spent so much time on trying to get it perfect before we launched it that we didn't end up launching anything at all. 

I don't think the idea was entirely bad! After all, my blog posts on the same topic did quite well for me at the time - as blog posts. 

But we were putting our ideas and our fire into a project that was bigger than our capacity for organizing things was at the time. Rather than shaping out a small piece, sharing it with the world, seeing what the world thinks of it, shaping out the next piece, sharing it again, and so on. Letting ourselves build capacity and learn about our potential audience before trying a big huge project. Letting people who might be interested in US find us, as we were finding them. 

So here's the second exercise. You've got three more questions in the google doc. I want you to go back to the doc or get out your pen and paper again, and think about these three questions: 

Thinking back about the people you wish knew more about linguistics: 

3. How do these people currently find out about things? Where are they hanging out, where do they get their information?  4. What do they want? What motivates them? How will learning something about linguistics make their lives better?  5. What's one small thing you could do in an hour or an evening that would get you one concrete step closer between where you are now and your 30 year vision? 

Again, you can put the plus sign beside things if you want to second them, that worked well earlier. (pause) Okay, and if you're still on the first question, try to move yourself down and think about the next one. (pause) And if you haven't had a chance to consider the final question yet, do try and get yourself down there, this document isn't going to disappear after this talk so you can keep thinking about all of the questions later as well. Also if you've finished writing things for all the questions, feel free to scroll back up and see what other people are saying. (pause) Okay, we're going to do another 30 seconds and then come back in. This is a good comment in the chat, we can have meetups on the final day, the meetup day, for any topics that people want to talk with each other about, feel free to propose those on the meetup schedule.  

[Slightly longer break overall, watching as people's cursor's move from one question to the next until activity slows down] 

Okay, coming back in again. How are we feeling? Seeing some really great and thoughtful answers from people which I'm not going to do justice summarizing, so do please browse the document and I'll just put a pin in the thought that we'll need to figure out something to do with this document after the conference, we're not going to delete it, it's not going away. 

I want to tell a third part to the story. 

A couple years later, in 2016, when Lauren Gawne and I were finally meeting in physical space for the same time at a conference, after years of getting to know each other through our blogs. And we were staying up late chatting about all things lingcomm and the various projects we'd tried and which ones had gone well and which ones had never quite gotten fully baked, because we both had some of both kinds. And when we were finally starting to talk about starting a podcast together, one of the things that made me think, "hmm, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership" was on the first night, Lauren said to me "oh, you can just pick whatever font you like, as long as you let me be the one who has all the detailed opinions about audio quality." 

And I was like, oh, audio quality, sure, absolutely! You can take that! Just like, I'm not having a whole font discussion again. 

Because as Lauren reminded me when I was practising this talk with her, we both came into the project that became Lingthusiasm with our own histories of lingcomm projects and collaborations. With our own 30 year goals and with the various different ways that we'd tried at various times to reach those goals. 

So the organizers of LingComm23 didn't ask me to talk to you today because of a mythical, magical, perfect website that never existed. But the projects that I am known for, things like Lingthusiasm and Because Internet, those are in real ways made possible by the lessons that I learned from the projects that didn't go as well. One of the big reasons my collaborations work better now is because I've learned to seek out people who have different areas of expertise and divide up the tasks involved in running a project, rather than everyone trying to have opinions about everything.

By the way, a really great thing happens when you're a decade into a career when suddenly all the sort of half-baked ideas and early awkward moments that you were trying to hide from people because you were embarrassed and you're trying to look professional and fancy, suddenly you get to pull them out and reexamine them and show them off as evidence that you understand the struggle.

So the reason I've asking you all to pause and consider these questions is that I find myself asking them a lot. Whether a project is still at the initial planning stages or it's been running for years, it's not a matter of thinking about how people are going to find your project that one time when you're first starting out, but that this is a question that's worth coming back to over and over again.

The question that I get most often from people who are working on lingcomm projects is, hey, I'm making this cool thing, I wanna make this cool thing, I'm working with some people and we're making this cool thing, but how do we get more people engaged with it? And every time, I ask them the same three questions: 

Who are you trying to reach?  Where are they?  What do they want? 

Not just what you think it's important for people to know, but what makes it enjoyable or even possible for people to engage with lingcomm. Sometimes that's about the content, like learning things that make them feel validated about their language background or learning from someone who can mix linguistics into cultural references that work for a particular community. Sometimes that's about format, maybe that's an event in a location that's convenient for them to get to, or it's having it in audio form so they can listen while doing the dishes, or it's NOT having it rely on audio because actually they can't do audio — there's not just one right answer here, there are lots of different things that people want. 

We're all at a conference about linguistics communication because we like linguistics. Because we believe in a better world where people know things like all language varieties are equally valid, and that there are thousands of spoken languages and hundreds of signed languages out there, and that oh my god, that etymology is probably NOT an acronym. No really, it's not. 

But our excitement, our passion, our drive, they're important, but they're not enough all by themselves. I can be excitedly delivering amazing, perfect, magical explanations of cool linguistics topics inside my living room and if no one is there to see or hear me, I have not yet done lingcomm. We always need to be figuring out that balancing act, between WHAT we're excited to talk about and HOW we can effectively reach people. How we can fit in the important messages that people need to know into the formats that mean that they can learn them effectively from us. 

And in my case, this meant that after I finished my masters, when my grad school friends were figuring out how to navigate the academic system and develop a research article pipeline and put things on an academic CV, I was also seeking out other areas of expertise, giving myself a crash course in journalism and book publishing and scicomm and running a small media business online. It turns out these things are both very interesting and very useful! And while I spend most of my career explaining linguistics to broader audiences, I also have another strand where I come back and explain methods of reaching the general public to linguists. 

Shortly before the pandemic hit, in February 2020, I went to the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, in Seattle. Yeah, I'm Canadian and I go to a lot of American conferences, that's how it is. And I was struck by how this conference explicitly made space for both academic scientists with an interest in reaching the public as well as science journalists and other types of public communication roles like communications officers, and how people moved fluidly between the various roles over the course of their careers. I talked with science PhD students who were planning out their first few media clips and journalists who were beefing up their expertise in particular areas of science. And I talked with a lot of people who had bridging careers sorta like mine, but for rocks, or microbes, or stars. And I thought this is cool. How do I get more of this for linguistics?  

So this is one of the purposes I hope for from this conference, that LingComm isn't just a conference of academic linguists saying in circles to each other "how do we reach beyond the ivory tower more?" "I dunno, I'm also up here in the ivory tower" "oh no" but it's also just as much a conference of people who've figured out some things in terms of attracting an audience of people who are interested in language and are now realizing that, oh god, I feel like an impostor because I don't actually know that much linguistics, but I wish I knew more linguistics, cause it's super interesting and like, people are asking me questions now, and I don't want to let them down, and I don't want the linguists to hate me, but like, halp? I just think these two groups of people could have some very fruitful conversations! [makes "now kiss" gesture, but like, in a metaphorical sense, obviously] 

There are some people like me who do lingcomm more or less full time, who figure out the delicate balancing act of making a living from a career in lingcomm, who develop expertise in that whole combination:  linguistics as a topic and the methods of getting messages out to groups of people and the business side of making a living while doing so. And one of my 30 year goals is for there to be more people in this position! 

But there are always going to be many more people where lingcomm is a part of what they do, whether that's a journalist who sometimes writes linguistics articles and sometimes writes articles on other topics, an academic who fits in interviews or a channel of their own around teaching and research and all the other responsibilities, or someone who maybe has a degree in linguistics or who's read a heck of a lot of books about it and has a dayjob somewhere else but finds talking about linguistics with people to be an incredibly fulfilling pasttime. And in many ways, it's the fact that so many of us are excited to talk about linguistics that makes me so optimistic about the next 30 years. 

I also ask these questions about 30 year visions because I want to underline that progress is possible. 

In 2021, at the first lingcomm, we were lucky to have as one of our speakers David Crystal, who's been doing lingcomm since 1969, which is longer than I've been alive, whose books are probably the reason some of you are here. And David also said that things have gotten better over the decades, that many of the myths linguists were trying to address in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s have now been pretty thoroughly busted,  that now when he does media interviews people are aware that they need to be talking with a linguist, which wasn't the case when he started doing them. We have made progress as a field in the public consciousness over the past 30 years, even when it doesn't always feel like we have, and we can aspire to more things in the next 30. 

We've even made progress in the past ten years, since I heard that talk that fired me up about lingcomm. 

So, a week before my book came out, in 2019, I went back and re-read some of the rejection letters that editors sent for Because Internet in 2015 (my suggestion is to never do this, this was a terrible idea for morale). But in retrospect, it's kind of interesting, because a couple of them said things like "I just don't think the market is there for a book about language that's not prescriptive." Four years later, I…look, I think we can safely say there was in fact a market for it. 

But what was more important for me, in terms of the 30 year plan, was hearing from other linguists who'd been able to cite the success of Because Internet in selling their own lingcomm books to publishers, in people feeling like my name on a blurb could help convince readers that this was the kind of book they might want to pick up, in being able to signal that there's a genre of books that also embrace a curious and analytical approach to language.

People who are readers read more than one book a year — and they read way more than one article. People who like podcasts listen to more than one podcast. People who like video subscribe to more than one account. People who like museums go to more than one museum. When I look at topics like pop history and pop science, god, they have SO MANY books and podcasts and scicomm accounts and museums and documentaries. This is my 30 year goal, that linguistics has a thriving ecosystem of so many ways that people can engage with it. 

Our competition isn't each other, it's all the other things people could be doing with their time and not even necessarily enjoying them. It's doomscrolling, it's aimlessly opening Netflix, it's playing silly little games on your phone. 

The goal of doing lingcomm isn't about ego, in trying to make one person into a celebrity. Frankly, I just think there are far more efficient ways of trying to become rich and famous. You know, have you considered making some weird food videos? Maybe having a weird looking pet and posting photos of it? I think those do pretty well. And like, I know we could all be getting more attention right now if we were willing to spout hot takes about how Insert Group Here are ruining language. We're here because we've chosen not to do that. We're here because we've chosen service to the harder path, the ethical path, the more rewarding path, of feeding people with language information that liberates them, that challenges them, rather than the easy path of stoking their insecurities and validating their prejudices. 

I hope that one of the things that the lingcomm conference becomes known for over the next 30 years is as a place to find collaborators to join you in this ethos of serving the public with lingcomm, whether that's students excitedly hatching ideas with each other like I did in my friend's car, or journalists and linguists connecting with each other to publish really great news stories, or more established projects finally meeting other people in their niche and thinking about how they could collaborate. 

 I'm already so delighted to NOT be on the organizing committee this year, that our incredible committee of chair Laura Wagner and members Keeta Jones, Lauren Gawne, Raquel Meister Ko. Freitag, Daniel Midgley, Sadie Ryan, and Martha Johnson have been doing such a fantastic job putting this conference together. Most of this committee met for the first time at LingComm21 and decided that this was a vision and a community worth investing their time and organizational energy in. And if this is a project that you also want to help keep happening, please join us on the final day, the meetup day, for a meeting about a potential LingComm25 in another two years. That conference is by no means guaranteed, and it will only happen if this community decides that it happens. 

This community is a rare space in which the value of lingcomm is taken for granted, a relief from most of our lives where we're constantly trying to justify what we're doing, whether we're communicators trying to justify why linguistic stories need to happen or linguists trying to justify why the public needs to know. And we can instead collaborate with each other on things like sharing what's worked and what hasn't worked with respect to audiences and gatekeepers like editors and producers and deans. 

Our 30 year visions for lingcomm are not things that any one of us is going to be able to accomplish alone. My vision for you, for us, for the next four days is that we meet people, we talk with people, we learn from people — and we emerge, all of us, back to our regular lives, knowing that we're not alone in being fired up about lingcomm. 

I look forward to meeting you and hanging out with you and hearing from you what gets you fired up about lingcomm over the rest of this conference and for the next 30 years. Thank you.