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MLC CO-DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

Can’t believe we are almost to the end of another year already! It has been a great one, with some big events yet to come, so don’t get into summer vacation mode just yet! Specifically, coming up in April, we will have a brownbag with Jen Dusenberry on Tuesday the 10th, our Linguistics Career Expo in our department during the evening of Wed, April 11th, and finally on Friday, April 20th Jennie Simpson, an anthropologist, will be talking to us about her DC-based research in the Policing of Homeless Individuals with Mental Illnesses. Read on for details!

We have also begun an exciting collaboration with an MA program in the UK, the MA in Intercultural Communication (ICC) at the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol, a program which is coordinated by Jo Angouri.

Our first conversation occurred on Tuesday, March 27th via teleconference link on the topic of professional identity. We explored ways to cultivate a “voice” that reflects our contextually situated “professional identity,” examining ways that we can convey our skills, interests, and abilities in a manner that communicates our passion

while establishing our selves as fit and “sounding professional”. This brownbag was the first step towards establishing professional connections with like-minded students “across the pond” and we very much hope the collaboration will continue (via Skype for now, possibly via visits in the future). This is for you all. So please let us know how you want to be involved!

Also on the theme of Constructing Professional Identities, we are continuing a research collaboration with the business school. If you would like to be involved in this research going forward, please set up a conversation with me to let me know how!

Finally, a big thank you to Dr. Jermay for all of his work on our (almost newly redesigned) website, for this very newsletter that you are reading now, for his coordination of the Spring brownbag series, and for one-on-one sessions that he is currently conducting to help our students prepare for the job market. If you have not had a mock interview with Jermay yet, you do not know what you are missing! We would have been lost without you this year, Jermay!

~ Dr. Anna Marie Trester

March, 2012 Issue 3, Volume 1

MLC NEWSLETTER

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COMPANY IN SPOTLIGHT

Active Voice, San Francisco

Active Voice is a strategic communications company with a clear goal: to use the power of words to facilitate social justice. As a team, they work with mediamakers, funders, advocates and thought leaders to ensure that the social justice issues have a human face and a story to tell us.

AV’s work includes three branches: campaigns, consulting, and the lab. Their campaigns designed after extensive message and framing research with the goal of audience engagement. These projects have included feature length films such as The Visitor, as well as documentaries, television dramas and websodes, including Food, Inc., The New Americans, Why Poverty, and the Equal Voice Youth Empowerment Project. For each project, the consulting team designs engagement events, educational materials, and digital content to create a dialogue between those of us watching, the stories themselves, and the sector leaders. Meanwhile, back at the lab, the AV team is immersed in R&D: coming up with innovative models for more accurate and effective leverage of “social-issue media.”

Here at the MLC we’re well-versed in the notion of EOC in the context of ethnography of communication. At AV, the acronym refers to “Ecosystems of Change”, or the intercommunication between diverse groups of people and an interdisciplinary approach to research and implementation. To this end, AV promotes the Three Ss of Framing: story, strategy, sustainability. The story comes first: without a personal narrative that resonates with and revolves around real people, a message can’t take root. Once the grassroots are in place, it takes a coherent and dynamic strategy to ensure that the message reaches people from each sector involved with the issue: government, non-profits, voters, public policy researchers, and (of course) funders with the money to

support the movement. Active Voice director Ellen Schnieder stresses that successful messaging requires framers to preach “beyond the choir”: not just to groups that already support the issue, but also to the voice that has yet to invest in the issue. Lastly, sustainability ensures that the story isn’t over once the lights come up in the theater: social change requires tireless effort, and campaign plans that make sure the story is not just told, but re-told and remembered.

As linguists, we’re familiar with the “active voice” as a way of grammatically expressing a relationship between cause and effect. At Active Voice, social change is not viewed as something that happens to the world. We create the change.

Active Voice recently partnered with American University’s Center for Social Media for the 8th annual Media that Matters conference. For information on how media can make change for good, including case studies and best practices, visit http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/. Learn more about Active Voice and how they are helping producers, organizations and foundations work together to harness the power of story-based media to spark social change at www.activevoice.net.

~ Kathryn Ticknor

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TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Web Development and Sociolinguistics

Throughout this semester, there have been a number of very interesting MLC brownbag workshops that I have been able to be a part of. In February’s brownbag, for example, I had the opportunity to hear from Rob Ponsajapan of CNDLEs on the topic of web development. Now, when you hear the term “web development”, you might think that it is not a task that we sociolinguists find ourselves doing. You may even have random images of geeky programmers and “nonsensible” codes conjuring up in your head right this moment. But it turns out that there is much more than just people with coding skills involved with web development. A well-designed website requires participation from people with various skills.

Rob focused on non-technical elements of any web development – presentation of web content (I am not sure Rob himself used these terms but I am putting a sociolinguistics spin on them). By content presentation, I am not referring to the production of actual materials that you see on any webpage. But I am referring to the strategic presentation of the self which in this case is of whatever organization or group that the website is intended for. Strategic presentation of the self, ring a bell? Well, indulge yourself here. Throw in sociolinguistics phrases and terms such as “identity construction”, “audience design”, “style” and etc., and pretty soon you will discover there is a deeper relationship between this and what we as linguists know already. The relationship, I realize, is a positive one.

One of the crucial steps in a fine organization and presentation of web content is figuring out not only who we are as an organization (I hope you do!) but also who our major “audiences” are. We have to audience-design. So that’s exactly what we did during this workshop. Once we have an idea of who the potential “audiences” are, we need to figure out how to present the website to not only one type of “audience” but multiple “audiences”. This step will lead us to some idea of how we would like to package

the content and present it in a way that is meaningful, structured and useful for these different types of known and unknown audiences. Knowing this is important but understanding their needs is even more important. One way to do this is to use our good-old fashioned “rapid and anonymous” interview to get a sense of what their needs are.

In the workshop, we did mini “rapid-and-not-so-anonymous” interviews with the participants. Ideally, you would use this technique with a large number of people to get a better understanding of not only what the people say but also how they express those needs with relationship to each other. Think at the discourse level. Having been trained in linguistics, you should be mindful of not only the occurrence of certain words or phrases expressing their needs but also how they relate to each other either in terms of sequence or semantics. But anyways, the mini-versions served well for our purposes. We had a sense of common issues and concerns. And then we used a lot of sticky notes to jot down different exiting contents and identified missing pieces that would make the organization and presentation of the website more complete and informative.

We then used different types of sticky notes to categorize these bits and pieces of information to fit particular needs of our audience members and arranged the on the whiteboard. This is where your variationist perspective might come in handy. Remember, coding and categorizing? In any case, you examine the existing content and think of a way to meaningfully organize them. You can set up certain rules to determine the precise placement and categorization of each content piece. That is exactly what we did. So there was a lot of moving around (people) in the room and much more so with the sticky notes on the whiteboard. Through this process, we were able to visualize the organization of the web content. Here is a photo of the whiteboard to prove my point.

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Connection to Panel Topic and/or Theme of Conference

Findings

Methods

Research Focus

Besides identifying the needs, we also have to get an idea of the audiences’ perception of us – that is how they see us, the self, the organization represented by the website. And we learn a lot about ourselves through others too. Remember, websites are built for a reason and they do not live in a vacuum. So perceptions matter in this case! We develop a web presence with the ultimate goal of getting our message across to various audiences. Through this we also want to construct a certain identity that we think truly reflects who the self (the organization) is and what it

stands for. But the identity that we construct through the website has to be interpreted correctly. The goal is to be the best self on line and then ensure that other relevant people see us that way. In other words, we have to match our intentions with the perceptions of other people when it comes to designing a well thought-out and useful website.

So, do you see why I suggested earlier that there is a deeper connection between sociolinguistics and web design? Well, I hope you do. There are systematic approaches used in both types of endeavors. A lot of what you learn through linguistics classes can be transferred to other areas. But in any case, I hope you will take advantage of these brownbag workshops (the next one coming up on April 10th) and see them as exciting venues where you can explore non-traditional applications of your linguistic knowledge. And please do let us know via email what kinds of topics and issues you would to be addressed in the next brownbag.

~Jermay

Academic Abstracts: The Mega-Tweet

The “Talking Business” team (Greg Bennett, Jermay Jamsu, Carolyn Reed, Anna Trester and Laura West) has been hard at work this year exploring language in our very own McDonough School of Business, and recently submitted to present at AAA! Very exciting (!), but that meant I had to write an abstract…

Having never written an abstract for submission before, the compressed style of an abstract seemed daunting. But I’m a child of the 80s, right? If I can manipulate 140 characters, I can work with 350 words. That bridge crossed, what do you include in an abstract? What do you leave out? And because I love diagrams, I present to you the components of an abstract:

The funnel shape of this diagram illuminates one further takeaway I have from this writing exercise: that being the transition from the general research focus to

the more specific research findings and back out to the connection of the paper to the conference as a whole.

Though brief, I hope this mini-guide to writing an abstract offers a starting point for anyone writing their first (or twenty-first!) academic abstract. Happy Conferencing, MLC!

~ Carolyn Reed

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ALUMNI NEWS

Congratulations to babies, weddings and engagement!

Sara RaySara Ray had a baby boy recently! He was born on 12/3/11, at 7lbs 11oz and 19 inches long. His major life accomplishments thus far are discovering he has hands, peeing into his own mouth when his diaper is changed, and frightening the bejesus out of the cats. His stuffed panda is his very best friend, and his mortal enemy is the car seat. His favorite activity is to be talked to, and he actually has very long “conversations” with anyone/thing who makes noise at him. Budding linguist?

Michelle Duvall KalinskiMichelle’s baby boy Hunter Richard Kalinski was born on September 8, 2011 and was 6lbs 13oz. He recently turned to six months old (wow!) and is up to a whopping 17.5lbs. Michelle has started trying to teach him some basic ASL signs and talking and singing to him in French. She hopes he’ll be able to communicate in multiple different ways when the time comes to use signs or words instead of just yelping!

Alison Deboer Got married on July 16, 2011!

Phan Ton & Ryan Connolly Got married on Feb 18, 2012!

Angela Wang Got engaged!

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DEPARTMENT NEWS

New Faculty

The department has been in the process of hiring several new faculty members to join us. A number of candidates have visited the department over the course of the semester, giving talks and interacting with students. The new faculty members will be announced towards the end of this semester.

GURT 2012

Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University recently held its annual conference GURT from March 8 – 11th. This year’s theme was “Measured Language” and included a larger number of researchers from a diverse range of linguistic inquiry within linguistics. Researchers offered multiple perspectives on assessing ESL writing, analysis of webtexts, cross-linguistic patterns of register variation, doctor-patient interaction and education of bilingual speakers. Participants are from a wide of range of linguistic backgrounds. And the conference helped linguists to share and incorporate perspectives and findings. Please visit the conference website for more details.

Newsletter

The Linguistics Department recently launched a new monthly newsletter aimed at informing the students of current events, area conferences/meetings, reading area conferences/ meetings, reading/research groups to join, service projects in the community, departmental deadlines, recently defended dissertations, featured books and grant spotlights. This was initiated by our current graduate student Pat Callier. Dr Hamilton describes the newsletter as “‘one-stop shopping’ - a kind of oasis in the midst of all our many email messages”. For more information please visit the site here https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/linguistics-news.

MLC & ICC

MLC has begun an exciting collaboration with an MA program in the UK, the MA in Intercultural Communication (ICC) at the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol, a program which is coordinated by Jo Angouri. The first conversation occurred on Tuesday, March 27th via teleconference laid the foundation for collaborative working environment for students on either side of the Atlantic.

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STUDENT NEWS

Casey Tefaye In November, current MLC’er Casey Tesfaye presented a paper entitled “Is there a Greater Analytic Potential for Open-ended Survey Questions? A Comparison of Analytic Strategies” at a conference of the Midwest Association of Public Opinion Researchers, or MAPOR. Casey comes to the MLC with a professional background in survey research, and works to integrate the MLC curriculum into that

framework. This paper is an attempt to bridge corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to fill a need among survey researchers. For Casey, working on the paper sparked a larger interest in the adaptation of discourse analytic theory to text analytics. The paper is available online at the conference website: http://www.mapor.org/2011_papers/6b5Tesfaye.pdf

UPCOMING EVENTS

April 10th, 2012

Jennifer Dusenberry, a Georgetown linguistics alum who now works as a communication and branding consultant with Lipman Hearne, will be the lead speaker at for last MLC brownbag of the semester. Please let Jermay know of possible topics of interest. The brownbag will be held from 12:30-1:30PM. Details forthcoming.

April 11th, 2012

Professional participants from around 12 area organizations and companies will be on hand to talk about their organizations and their work as researchers, consultants, writers, editors, trainers, managers, and language and communication specialists in government, education, business and non-profit sectors. The first ever Linguistics Career Expo (Networking Event) will be taking place from 6:30-8PM in Room 230 of Poulton Hall.

April 20th, 2012

Jennie Simpson an anthropologist will be talking to us about her DC-based research into “Community As a God Word: Exclusionary and Inclusionary Discourses in the Policing of Homeless Individuals with Mental Illnesses.”

May 17th, 2012

Dr. Michael Erard, a friend of MLC, will be speaking and signing books at Politics & Prose. He writes about language, languages, and the people who use and study them, but he also writes about culture and technology. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Science, Wired, Slate, The Atlantic, New Scientist, Reason, The Morning News, and many other magazines and newspapers.

May 18th, 2012 Dr. Michael Erard will be speaking at the Interagency Language Roundtable (National Foreign Language Center NFLC), College Park , MD.