What's Neat on the Net: Academic Version

What's Neat on the Net.

1) This week I listened to a podcast interview of Joe Milutis (hosted by Stephen McLaughlin) at In the Field: Jacket 2. I can't pretend to have followed all the philosophical references, but I still truly enjoyed the discussion of Oulipo, Milutis's new book Failure, A Writer's Life, and many other topics. Milutis also suggested that one's practice of writing should make one happier and more connected to one's world, and that gave me something to think about. There's a very amusing musical performance by Milutis as well, to kick off the show. I recommend this interview as thought-provoking, enough so that I'll soon be getting both the book mentioned above and the author's Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, an earlier book.

2) Last year I posted a link to the Small World of Words project, an online word association project conducted by linguists and psychologists that anyone could participate in by playing an online vocabulary game and thereby generating research data.

I recently got an email from Joshua Hartshorne, post-doc fellow at MIT, who has his own collaborative project with linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists, on the meaning of verbs. They are crowd-sourcing their data as well, so if you would like to play some of their games and add to their data set, you can at GamesWithWords: VerbCorner.  And here is an announcement of the project, in case you want to know more. But be forewarned: I went over there to have a look and spent over an hour (which I don't have as the semester ends in a week) playing verb games.

Hartshorne also has a second language acquisition project at GamesWithWords: TheVocabQuiz. This is a vocabulary game, and I lost some time messing around with it too. But it's all for a good cause: research. (Now, if I could only convince my bosses and professors of that!)

Enjoy.