Osnabrück, Vancouver, Birmingham and other things
Note: this post is largely about my conference travel plans for the next two months and a few academic issues. I promise to publish something more clearly corporate-blogging-related very soon.
As already mentioned in the last post, I was at the University of Osnabrück last month to present something related to methodology in corpus linguistics. My basic claim was that there are merits to using blogs as corpus data, because it allows us to effectively analyze the language use of countless individuals. This adds a level of granularity when making generalizations about “language as such” - what may be frequent in one speaker’s use may be non-existent in another’s. Anyway, you can have a look at the presentation slides if you like:
Turning to the future, I’m excited about my first trip to Canada next month. I am presenting at the 2007 PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver and the title of the talk is “eLanguage.net: Shifting the paradigm in linguistics from academic publishing to scholarly communication”. It’s a hot topic for me, as I’m the lead developer for eLanguage, the Linguistic Society of America’s platform for open access, peer-reviewed electronic journals (see my previous post). We hope to expand out talk into an article for a special issue of First Monday, to be published after the conference.Finally, I’m also presenting at the Corpus Linguistics 2007 in Birmingham (U.K., not U.S.). My presentation is part of the colloquium Towards a Reference Corpus of Web Genres, which will be mainly concerned with computational approaches to automatically classifying types of web pages according to their linguistic (and other) content. Read my abstract here (and yeah - of course it’ll be about my corporate blog collection).
I’ll be in Vancouver from the 10th to the 15th of July and in Birmingham on the 26th and 27th, also July. Be sure to say hello if you’re there and have the burning desire to talk about corporate blogging, linguistics, or the new Modest Mouse album.
As you can see, the work of the poorly paid PhD student is never done. Not that other people don’t get a whole lot more blogging done, despite a schedule that is far busier than mine for sure…