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Putting interaction centre-stage
I’ve been taking part (virtually) in a workshop today at the Cognitive Science conference in Sydney entitled “Putting interaction center-stage for the study of knowledge structures and processes”. Kicking off the workshop, my own contribution was a summary of our Beyond Single-Mindedness manifesto. This was followed by Nick Enfield, who argued that concepts are necessarily…
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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you…
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Thinking visually with Remarkable
Sketches, visualizations and other forms of externalizing cognition play a prominent role in the work of just about any scientist. It’s why we love using blackboards, whiteboards, notebooks and scraps of paper. Many folks who had the privilege of working the late Pieter Muysken fondly remember his habit of grabbing any old piece of paper…
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Monetizing uninformation: a prediction
Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction. Of course OpenAI and other purveyors of stochastic parrots are keeping the receipts of what they…
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Talk, tradition, templates: a meta-note on building scientific arguments
Reading Suchman’s classic Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, I am impressed by her description David Turnbull’s work on the construction of gothic cathedrals. In brief, the intriguing point is that no blueprints or technical drawings or even sketches are known to have existed for any of the early modern gothic cathedrals, like that of…
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A serendipitous wormhole into the history of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA)
A serendipitous wormhole into #EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess what he says some time into the audio-recorded version of his 1988 Chicago weekend seminar (see lines 7-11) [Chicago, 1988. Audio recording of David Sudnow’s weekend seminar] We learn too quickly and cannot afford to…
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Sometimes precision gained is freedom lost
Part of the struggle of writing in a non-native language is that it can be hard to intuit the strength of one’s writing. Perhaps this is why it is especially gratifying when generous readers lift out precisely those lines that {it?} took hard work to streamline — belated thanks! Interestingly, the German translation for Tech…
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The perils of edited volumes
Ten years ago, fresh out of my PhD, I completed three papers. One I submitted to a regular journal; it came out in 2012. One was for a special issue; it took until 2017 to appear. One was for an edited volume; the volume is yet to appear. These may be extreme cases, but I…
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Deep learning, image generation, and the rise of bias automation machines
DALL-E, a new image generation system by OpenAI, does impressive visualizations of biased datasets. I like how the first example that OpenAI used to present DALL-E to the world is a meme-like koala dunking a baseball leading into an array of old white men — representing at one blow the past and future of representation…
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Always plot your data
Always plot your data. We’re working with conversational corpora and looking at timing data. What do you do when distributions look off?
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Why article-level metrics are better than JIF if you value talent over privilege
I’ve been caught up in a few debates recently about Recognition and Rewards, a series of initiatives in the Netherlands to diversify the ways in which we recognize and reward talent in academia. One flashpoint was the publication of an open letter signed by ~170 senior scientists (mostly from medical and engineering professions), itself written…
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Van betekenisloze getallen naar een evidence-based CV
Lezenswaardig: een groep jonge medici ageert tegen de marketing-wedstrijd waarin volgens hen narratieve CVs in kunnen ontaarden — de nieuwste bijdrage aan het Erkennen & Waarderen-debat. Maar niets is wat het lijkt. Over evidence-based CVs, kwaliteit & kwantificatie. Eerst dit: de brief benoemt het risico dat je met narratieve CVs een soort competitie krijgt tussen…
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New paper: Interjections (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)
📣New! “Interjections“, a contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Word Classes. One of its aims: rejuvenate work on interjections by shifting focus from stock examples (ouch, yuck) to real workhorses like mm-hm, huh? and the like. Abstract: No class of words has better claims to universality than interjections. At the same time, no category has…
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On gatekeeping in general linguistics
An exercise. Take 1️⃣️this paper on ‘Language disintegration under conditions of formal thought disorder‘ and 2️⃣ this Henner and Robinson preprint on ‘Imagining a Crip Linguistics‘. Now tell us in earnest that only one of these contains “theoretical implications that shed light on the nature of language and the language faculty”. (That was the phrasing…
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Titling scholarly work in anthropology: Signifying significance, enregistering erudition
Betwixt and between: structure and anti-structure in titular rituals (>600 papers with “Betwixt & between” in title) Homo Imitatens: Ludic pretense as a cover for essentialist tropes in anthropological titling (>2000 papers with “Homo + Latin Participle”, excluding sapiens & erectus) Beyond Colons: Towards subtitles as sites for ponderous prolixity (>600 papers with “Beyond X:…
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The sound of rain, softly falling (Tucker Childs, 1948-2021)
News just reached me that we have lost a dear colleague and one of the people responsible for introducing the world of linguistics to African ideophones: George Tucker Childs, 1948-2021. Tucker was a cheerful presence in the field of African linguistics and a towering figure in the subfield that he and I had in common,…
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APA but without auto-sorting of in-text citations: easy CSL fix
For better or worse, APA is one of the most widely used citation styles in the cognitive sciences. One aspect of it that always bugs me is that it prescribes alphabetical sorting of in-text citations. I’m not talking about the bibliography; of course that should be alphabetical. I’m talking about the order of names when…
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A rant about Elsevier Pure
I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this mini-rant my notes for that occasion. Most importantly, we…
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Team science is slow science
With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science. On that note, consider this: Team science is (often) slow science. Recently two team science projects I’ve been involved in since the…