• Kat Gupta’s research blog

    caution: may contain corpus linguistics, feminism, activism, LGB, queer and trans stuff, parrots, London

Author: Kat

3 Comments

Pride is a….something

  By

Yesterday I went to my second Pride. It was better than last year for a couple of reasons – we started marching from Market Square to Forest Fields so got plenty of visibility (as opposed to the extended tour of Nottingham’s back streets of last year) and this time I was at a stall, watched the acoustic stage, had the good sense to leave before I got irritable and wasn’t subjected to the Cheeky Girls. I was marching with Recreation, the local group I help out with, and that made it a good experience. One of the group members remarked that he felt he belonged, and it was good to meet new people who’d been looking for a group like ours. It’s why I call my involvement in this group activism – I might not be on the streets with a loudhailer, but for me, making this space possible, acknowledging the diversity of people’s identities, and offering solace and support is activism. It’s telling people they are not alone and that in itself is a powerful thing.

Marching through the city centre actually felt meaningful – not quite confrontational, but both unexpected enough and big enough to take people by surprise. One of the reasons I march is because visibility is important. It’s a reminder to other people that LGBTQ people exist – that we have families and work and are members of society too.

However, as last year, I had problems with Pride. Bisexual invisibility is a pervasive thing – bifurious is on the bi banner for a reason. This year, one entertainer invited the gays to cheer, the lesbians to cheer and the straights to cheer – completely failing to acknowledge bisexuals, pansexuals and queers, among others. It’s a reminder that often, it’s not so much LGBT as LGBt and that this comes from within the so-called gay community.

There’s also a danger that Pride gets too heavily involved with corporate sponsors. This year’s was sponsored by the owners and operators of Kingsnorth Power Station. At least Nottingham Pride is free – others, like Manchester and Brighton already, or have plans to, charge an entry fee. Pride Is A Protest campaign “against profiteering, exploitation and commercialisation of our Queer and LGBT community events and festivals”. It’s been criticised for being a protest about the lack of protest but at the same time, they warn of where corporate sponsorship can end up.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this whole Pride business. Rather than being unambiguously celebratory, for me it highlights issues that still need to be addressed, particularly problematic discourses within the gay community and the role of corporate sponsorship in community events; however, simultaneously, it offers a form of challenging visibility and the chance to (for lack of a better word) connect with others.

No comments

Corpus Linguistics 2011

  By

I admit that I was feeling rather grumpy before CL2011. Extracting my data had proved tricky, I worried that the stuff I was working on wasn’t ready to present and I was feeling somewhat anti-social.

However, I ended up having a rather good conference. Part of it is just that corpus linguists tend to be nice people – as one first-time attendee noted to me, people were constructive and helpful when commenting on people’s presentations. This is not always the case – these things can turn into an academic pissing contest – and she was pleasantly surprised. As Costas noted, it can feel a bit like a family reunion (the good kind, I hope). It was nice to catch up with friends, meet new people and extract others from the hilariously awkward situations they managed to create for themselves. I have a story about a red devil tattoo now.

The organisation was impeccable. This was the first conference I’ve been to that was in a dedicated conference centre rather than in a university. I’ve got to say, the food was much better than I’m used to at these things. I won’t name names, but some of us were rather enamoured with the little moussey-cakey things at lunch. The only problem seemed to be with workshop venues – there weren’t computing facilities so attendees were asked to bring their own laptops, but the room assigned to one workshop wasn’t suitable for an active, hands-on workshop.
The conference scheduling was thoughtfully done and I presented in the same session as others working on newspaper discourse including Anna Marchi. It was interesting both for us and for the audience – we could make links between each others’ papers and also had the chance to talk afterwards.

I do wonder why corpus linguists haven’t really embraced twitter though. There was a presentation on it (which I live–tweeted) but we weren’t told about hashtags, organised a tweetup or similar. Having seen something of how my astrophysicist sister uses twitter at her conferences I think we’re missing out – it looks like a good way of engaging with presentations and finding other conference attendees. Next time eh?

No comments

“To the Editor of the Times…”

  By

Apologies for the silence. I am trying to write a conference paper for, um, Thursday and my data is stubbornly refusing to organise itself into categories. In a way I’m quite pleased – I’m now working with two corpora and it’s interesting that they show this difference. One is the Suffrage corpus that I’ve been using until now, created by identifying all the articles in the Times Digital Archive containing suffrag* and pulling them out. The asterisk is a wildcard which means that I don’t need to specify an ending – because it’s got that wildcard in it, the search term will find suffrage, suffragism, suffragette, suffragettes, suffragist, suffragists and so on. It will also identify Suffragan, an ecclesiastical term and one that has nothing to do with the suffrage movement. So the script has an exception in it for that term.

The other corpus is composed of Letters to the Editor – the LttE corpus. This sounds very staid and genteel but actually contained heated exchanges between different factions of the suffrage movement, the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League, various anti-suffragist men and anyone else who felt compelled to stick their oar in. At times it reads more like a blogging flamewar! This corpus was extracted using suffrag* as a search term to get letters mentioning suffrage etc; to get the letters I looked at the header of each text. The header contains information like the file name, the date it was published in the Times, the title of the article and, crucially, what it’s classified as – News, Editorials, Leaders or, indeed, Letters to the Editor. So this time the script looked for suffrag* and Letters to the Editor in the header.

Both corpora are divided by year and month, so I have a folder for 1908, 1909, 1910 etc and within those, sub-folders for each month. So if I wanted to, I could compare texts from April 1909 to April 1910, or June 1913 to December 1913, or the first six months of 1911 to the first six months of 1912. I like organising corpora in a way that allows this flexibility.

In Chapter Four, I investigated Mutual Information (MI) for suffragist, suffragists, suffragette and suffragettes in each year in the Suffrage corpus, then categorised the words it came up with. Mutual Information is a measure of how closely words are linked together. So, suffragist and banana aren’t linked at all, but as I found, suffragist and violence are linked. I then came up with categories for these words – direct action, gender, politics, law & prison and so on, and compared these categories across the different years.

I’ve now done the same for the LttE. What’s interesting is that there is not much overlap between the words associated with suffragist, suffragists, suffragette and suffragettes in the LttE corpus and the words associated with suffragist, suffragists, suffragette and suffragettes in the Suffrage corpus. Part of this is to do with the different functions of the texts; rather than reporting news, the Letters to the Editor try to argue, advocate and persuade. However, there are also words like inferior, educated and employed in the LttE data – words that seem to be more about the attributes of women or suffragist campaigners. This just doesn’t seem to be a feature in the Suffrage data.

Also interestingly, the categorise I came up with don’t work for this corpus. While direct action was a prominent category for the Suffrage corpus, I don’t think I can find a single term in the LttE MI data. Not even things like demonstration which is pretty innocuous as far as direct action goes.

So what’s going on here? At least part of it is due to the different functions of news reports and what are essentially open letters. But I think there’s also a difference in who was writing the letters. Letters to the Editor offered both suffrage campaigners and anti-suffrage campaigners an opportunity to represent their views themselves, rather than being represented by or mediated through a reporter, editor and others engaged in the the production of a news report. I don’t think it’s that strange that the language they use and avoid is different.

No comments

Live at Jodrell Bank

  By

Been a bit quiet here, mainly because I’ve been writing and rewriting parts of chapters 3 and 5 and fuelled for the most part by caffeine, discounted creme eggs and irregular sleeping patterns. It’s not been pretty.

However, I did manage to get to Live from Jodrell Bank, tickets purchased for my birthday by my favourite little sister. As the name suggests, it took place at Jodrell Bank and the stage was in the shadow of the Lovell Telescope itself. The Lovell telescope is an impressive structure and seeing it surrounded by people and bathed in glorious sunshine was definitely a change!

Stage beside, and dwarfed by, the Lovell telescopeDetail of the supporting structure of the dish

There were also interesting people wandering around. The chap in the photo below-right was dressed in black, wearing a large crow’s head and clutching two large white balloons. We saw him around all day but didn’t manage to work out what he was doing (apart from looking dramatic).
Man wearing a crow's head over his head holding two large white balloons
The new visitor centre was open and my friend Liz and I had fun playing with something that resembled an old charity money-spinner. It looked like a large black funnel, and you started rolling a ball at the top. The ball would spiral down the funnel until it dropped out of the hole at the bottom. You could then retrieve your ball and do it all over again – multiple times if you’re a small child fascinated by such things or, indeed, two twenty-somethings. It was also fun sending one ball clockwise and the other counter-clockwise and either trying to get them to crash into each other or avoid each other but I’m almost positive this was not the point of the exercise! The point was that this simple model helps we, the general public, understand how black holes work in a fun and hands-on way. People of all ages could engage with it, although the baby we saw there was more interested in chucking the balls straight down the hole!

The map showing different telescopes around the world was striking and really illustrated how the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA) is part of a global community of researchers. It also offered information on the different types of telescopes and showed how the facilities used by the JBCA, such as the e-Merlin network, fit into a wider context.

The line-up was Alice Gold, The Waves Machines, OK GO, British Sea Power and The Flaming Lips. I was especially looking forward to British Sea Power – there’s an endearingly wide-eyed wonder about the natural world in their music; they’ve written a song about a collapsing coastal Antarctic shelf and light pollution. One of the songs they played was the rather appropriate Observe The Skies which I think they dedicated to the Lovell Telescope. British Sea Power are known for decorating the stage with foliage and the appearance of a large bear. This time there was a bear fighting a robot/microwave.

The Flaming Lips put on an entertaining show, incorporating giant hamster balls, lasers, balloons filled with confetti and close-ups of Wayne Coyne’s nostrils. They wanted to mess around with intros and the audience wanted to sing along so there was a lot of “wait for it, wait for it…wait for it…” going on. I’m far too sleepy to attempt to interpret their lyrics, but Race for the Prize might be about two scientists and Do You Realize?? informs us that we are floating in space.

I was standing just in front of Jen so was treated to the physicists arguing over how they did the lasers and what constellations and planets we could see. Astronomers are interesting people to know when you’re standing in a field at night!

Brightly coloured balloons floating in front of a brightly lit stageBalloons floating in front of a brightly lit stage and lit so they seem to glow

As well as being an interesting and unusual music event, it was also an effective outreach event. PhD and postdoc researchers were on hand with science tricks, there were short talks throughout the afternoon by astronomers and Dr Tim O’Brien took to the stage to talk about the kind of research that takes place at Jodrell Bank. He played recordings of pulsars and people were cheering and clapping in time with them. It’s probably the first time I’ve heard people chanting SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE at a gig. There was something joyfully and unapologetically geeky about it: there was an atmosphere of “we’re at a gig under a radio telescope, isn’t this amazing?” As Jen said in her talk, science is about having that sense of wonder and curiosity about the universe and trying to understand it better. There’s nothing uncool about that.

Of course it made me think about what linguistics could do. While communication is a fascinating thing, we collect our data from people, not the vastness of space. Unfortunately the hard drive where my corpora are stored or a digital recorder aren’t as dramatic as a telescope, especially one as iconic as the Lovell. Instead, I reckon we should reverse it: instead of trying to find a suitably research-intensive location for the gig, I reckon we should make the gig research-intensive and record band-crowd interactions or something.

Space and stars also inspire people to write songs about them. While Massive Attack deserve a mention for “love, love is a verb; love is a doing word” in Teardrop and The Indelicates for “You know exactly how clever sounds, the soft consonants and rounded vowels” in Jerusalem, I’m kind of drawing a blank on linguistic songs. I did, however, find a paper on a corpus analysis of rock harmony so that’s something, right?

Any suggestions for linguistics songs? Are there any for your area? What would your dream outreach event be?

Photos by K. Gupta and E. Kedge

No comments

Redesign

  By

You may have noticed that the layout has changed recently. I’m now using Alahualpa and I think I’ve more or less finished fiddling with CSS – it helps that there’s an active forum prepared to answer things about centreing the logo and removing dotted lines to satisfy my perfectionist streak. There’s something quite relaxing about coding.

The image is taken from this one of Edith Garrud, known as the suffragette that knew jujitsu. I like how she’s this small, slender figure who’s already flung some men around and that was just to warm up. The group of big, burly policemen surrounding her seem rather reluctant to approach her.

5 Comments

The politics of representation

  By ,

Because I’m trying to clear some tabs, here’s a useful definition of representation I found and need to read more about:

As Gilles Deleuze […] has argued, the politics of representation which currently predominates is not interested in representing as the term is commonly understood; it is no process of ‘speaking on behalf of’, but rather one of silencing; one of crushing difference in favour of identities constructed by those in positions of power. In this instance, the diverse, plural and problematic identities of those marching have been collapsed into the creation of a majority which cannot speak for itself.

From Anarchists: ‘unemployable layabout scum’? at Ballots & Bullets

One of the difficult things about doing an interdisciplinary PhD is the amount of catchup in other areas you have to do. My background is in linguistics rather than history, politics or sociology. As such, it’s a joy to come across something like this – not only should it lead to a citable text for my thesis (gotta catch em all!), but it also shows that my thinking isn’t completely out of step with theorists in these different areas.

5 Comments

Better learning through cake

  By

Let us travel back in time, around 13 or 14 years ago or so, and revisit my experience of compulsory education. More specifically, a subject for which I reserved particular loathing and hatred: Food Tech.

My friend Maria and I shared a counter and sink. We weren’t just bad – we were inspired. We ruined pasta. We earned the rage and ire of our Food Tech teacher by swapping bits of our scone dough (mine – sultana, hers – coconut) to create mutant scones. And finally, there was The Fruitcake. The Fruitcake was the nadir of my brief foray into cooking and sufficiently traumatised me to Never Ever try baking again because I would unleash untold horrors. Again. We had technology for the double period – two hours – in the afternoon, and I remember sitting in the classroom after the bell had rung and my friends had gone home, waiting for the teacher to allow me to take it out of the oven. I thought it was done; she was convinced it wasn’t. The result was so dry it sucked all moisture out of your mouth and made saliva a distant and fond memory. In the end I crumbled it up for the birds because my family, long suffering as they were, quite understandably refused to take it to extremes.

At the age of thirteen, I decided that I distrusted this baking malarky and would have nothing to do with it. In fact, Maria and I were genuinely worried we’d starve or die of scurvy if we had to fend for ourselves.

Years later, and I find myself reasonably competent in the kitchen. Soup, risotto, curries, roasted vegetables, lentilly-couscousy-salady things – yep. But despite my love of cake, I haven’t dared bake anything. I’ve watched people bake, I’ve enthusiastically tested their baking, I’ve regularly attended my LGBT Network’s Queer Cafe and I’ve even decorated cakes (sadly, this seems to be the best photo of the Spiderman cake but it was pretty awesome). I’ve just never quite worked up the confidence to combine flour, eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl. Logically, I know I’ve cooked far more complicated stuff than this but it was no good: I had The Fear.

My friend Hannah at Stress Baker told me that baking is an excellent way to escape from PhD stress and bakes delicious things so often she’s started a blog. My housemate made carrot cake last evening and it smelt wonderful plus, as she argued, the amount of carrot and dried fruit in it meant it was at least one of your 5-a-day and therefore good for you. You can even buy butch cupcakes if your fragile masculinity is threatened by baked goods or you’re amused by manifestations of socially constructed and validated performances of gender. Also, and let this point not go unnoticed, you end up with cake.

So I found a recipe that seemed to offer maximum return/chocolate for minimum effort/skill and an hour or so later, had this:
Chocolate cake on a plate
Perhaps not the most beautiful of cakes, but who cares, it tastes fine. And, more importantly, can’t be used as a substitute for floral foam.

It made me think a lot about experiences of learning. As PhD researchers and academics, we tend to be good in our fields. It might not always be easy and we’re not going to be amazing at every single area within our field, but usually it doesn’t compare to the head-banging frustration of studying something you have absolutely no talent at and are scared of. Those we teach sometimes have no previous experience of whatever we’re trying to teach them, but they often have some – and had bad experiences rather than good ones.

In my experience, it’s often grammar; they’ve found it boring or confusing or pitched at the wrong level – too easy, too hard, or suddenly lurching from “easy” to “scarily difficult”. Sometimes they had a bad teacher. Sometimes the exercises were boring and tedious. Sometimes it’s been taught in isolation and no one’s shown how it can be used to analyse texts. The experience of being told you’re rubbish at something has many effects, not least lack of confidence, resentment and aversion.

Sometimes, when you’re good at something, it’s unfathomable how anyone could possibly find it difficult. It’s useful to make ourselves uncomfortable to remind us how that feels in order to be better teachers.

For that reason, I have purchased white chocolate chips and dried cranberries. Exactly that reason.

One Comment

when the internet stops being a playground

  By

Last week, a post appeared on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog reporting that the blog’s author, Amina Arraf, had been kidnapped by security forces. People responded. They tweeted, they wrote to Syrian embassies, the news got picked up by LGBT and mainstream news.

However, there were doubts about whether this person existed. Liz Henry observed “I would hate to have my existence doubted and am finding it painful to continue doubting Amina’s. If she is real, I am very sorry and will apologize and continue to work for her release and support”. What if this person did exist and was in danger? Amina may not exist – but what if she did, what if she had been kidnapped and was being forcibly deported, beaten or abused? The stakes seemed too high to just dismiss it.

Liz Henry had her doubts, based on experience with other hoaxes, and wrote about them in two posts: Painful doubts about Amina and Chasing Amina. Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty carefully examined what evidence they had to work out Amina’s identity.

The Amina blogger turned out to be Tom McMaster – a 40 year old male Masters student studying in Edinburgh. He apologised, claiming that he did “not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about”. LGBT bloggers in Syria were understandably furious. Contrary to McMaster’s claim that he did not harm anyone, they describe tangible ways he has made their lives and online activities less safe – drawing authorities’ attention to their activism, forcing them back into the closet, caused people to doubt their existence or the authenticity of their reports. As Brian Whitaker says, “[l]iving a fantasy life on your own blog is one thing, but giving an interview to CNN while posing as a representative of the region’s gay people appears arrogant and offensive, and surely a prime example of the “liberal Orientalism” that MacMaster claims to decry”.

In a weird twist, the editor of “Lez Get Real”, Paula Brooks, has also turned out to be a straight man. He said that he “didn’t start this with my name because… I thought people wouldn’t take it seriously, me being a straight man”. I have to admit, with some annoyance, that I have not noticed straight, cisgendered, white men as having a particular problem with “not being taken seriously” – this is privilege 101 stuff.

What this seems to be is a clash of internet cultures. On one hand, the internet is perceived as a playground for identities. As Liz Henry notes, people may have good reason “to conceal their identity and to develop relationships online under a screen name. They might like to express an aspect of their personality that would not mix well with their professional life. They might have gender identity issues they are working through. They might be in a family situation that makes it unsafe for them to come out as gay. They might write fiction using characters whose stories are under copyright”.

However, on the other, citizen journalism and minority blogging relies on authenticity; of you experiencing something that mainstream media doesn’t cover. It relies on telling your truth, shining light into areas where top-down media does not, or cannot, reach. It can be incredibly powerful – Baghdad Burning was just one example. There’s a tension between the internet as a consequence-free playground for identity, and the fact that sometimes these identities have very real consequences.

I also note that it’s straight white men doing this, and I’m finding it difficult to interpret this in isolation of that. @paleblurrr observed, in a series of tweets, “straight and/or white men not getting automatic respect/authority afforded to them in mainstream society in queer and/or poc communities, instead of respectful engagement from a place of privilege, fake identities to infiltrate and feel “powerful”. that’s all about power & control, ensuring they dominate conversations & are centre of our attention at whatever cost to others. can’t ever not be about them. Ever.”

I think what bothers me is the deliberate lying, manipulation and deception. Not stating your identity and allowing people to make their assumptions is one thing. Experimenting with different voices and persona in a setting where that’s acceptable and acknowledged is another. But creating a persona that is a member of a minority group and using that to speak on behalf of people when you do not share their lives, experiences or oppressions, and putting real people in danger when they cared about your created persona? That seems different, and makes it a much more complicated, uncomfortable and deeply problematic situation.

Edited to add: A few links which I thought were interesting – Said says Amina Hoax MacMaster-mind is Orientalist, Identity drag: Amina, appropriation and accountability and Men masquerading as lesbians online: allies or cowards?.

No comments

New College of Humanities

  By

Been a bit of a busy few weeks. I’ve been attempting to write more of my methodology (it’s been in progress since Jan 2009 and I’m at the stage of loathing and despair) but I also went undercover (my cover name: Jo King) to a dating seminar aimed at heterosexual women (it would have been full of lulz but for the fact that women were taken in by this gender essentialist, heteronormative, frankly insulting crap and were spending some £500 to go on a weekend filled with more of the same).

However, the post-apocalyptic maelstrom of higher education has just got a bit more turbulent with the announcement of the New College of the Humanities. Dan Rebellato summarises it as:

A C Grayling has announced the formation of a new private college of Higher Education. The New College of the Humanities will charge fees of £18,000 and students will be taught be such renowned media dons as Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Ronald Dworkin, David Cannadine, Niall Ferguson, Steve Jones, and Peter Singer. There will be core courses in scientific literacy, applied ethics, and critical thinking, and then students will specialise in law, philosophy, economics, history, English literature, or some combination of those.

Other people have written about this:
Tery Eagleton: AC Grayling’s private university is odious
Research Blogs: Is the New College of the Humanities a good thing?
Crooked Timber: If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re trying to sell an undergraduate arts degree that costs more than an MBA?
Student Theory: New College for the Humanities: Emperor’s New Clothes
Dan Rebellato: New College of the Humanities

I spent some of yesterday talking to friends about this, one of whom went on to write Thirteen ways of looking at the New College of the Humanities.

My initial reaction is wariness, on both an ideological and academic level. Is the solution to chronic underfunding of the humanities one of making them the preserve of a rich elite? It’s already happening at undergraduate level and pretty widespread at doctoral level. This is neither fair nor good for research.
Academically, I can’t really see those top academics taking first-year tutorials – and, indeed, at least two academics will only be lecturing for one hour in the first year and the minimum for most professorial staff is five hours in the first year. Despite being a typical Arts undergrad, I had most contact hours than that a week! Admittedly six, but still… So who is going to be teaching? And, if you’re going to be taught by academics who aren’t media stars, i.e. the kind of academics you’ll find in universities up and down the country, what are you paying for?

The things I do find interesting are the focus on critical thinking and scientific literacy, and the way these degrees are aimed at those who don’t want to go into academia. Critical thinking and scientific literacy are important (although teaching critical thinking to people who are paying twice the going rate for a UoL degree could be…interesting). While I did not enjoy my Biology and Chemistry A-levels At All, they’ve come in useful when discussing variables, p-values, research design and, er, cisgenderism.
I’m also intrigued by the focus of a degree that is aimed at passionate, engaged students but isn’t an elaborate pyramid scheme and doesn’t just flail about going “um, transferable skills! yes! those are useful!”. I didn’t apply to study English because I wanted to develop excellent communication and time management skills – I did it because I loved words and language and wanted to know how they worked. This, to me, is one of the interesting things about arts and humanities degrees. While some degrees have more obvious applications – economics, for example – how do you make a passionate love for seventeenth century literature applicable in a job market? Never fear though, Grayling’s on the case.

No comments

Three conferences

  By

In the past month or so, I’ve been to three very different kinds of conference: one academic conference in my field, one NUS LGBT conference, and one postgraduate symposium in my department. They’re all quite different, both in aims and the experience they provide.

collection of name tags
The academic conference in my field was perhaps the most straightforward. There were concurrent sessions organised by panel, each paper lasted around 20 minutes + 10 minutes for questions. It was focused on corpus linguistics, my primary field, but as corpus linguistics encompasses a huge range of things, I still found new, unfamiliar and exciting things. As a PhD researcher, it’s rewarding to go to specialised conferences in your area and find yourself getting more and more familiar with the field; I remember my first conference in 2007 and just being dazzled by it all, whereas now I think I’m more confident.

The NUS LGBT conference was about making policy, sharing knowledge and experience in workshops, and returning us to our university LGBTs as fired-up, knowledgeable, passionate activists. There’s lots of slightly unfamiliar terminology and processes – that of zones, motions, amendments, parts, speeches for and against, “I see that delegate there” and so on. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s haunted by the words “seal the doors!” and “we’ve had a request for parts…” The needs of participants were key, and of the three conferences this one was perhaps most explicitly concerned with accessibility. I found it was also the most personal of the three conferences in that it really makes you re-examine and reflect on your beliefs.

The third, held in my department, was actually the first postgraduate symposium I’ve attended. It was organised into panels, apparently by supervisor – this effectively grouped similar areas together. It was the first really cross-disciplinary conference I’ve attended; I’ve tended to go to conferences organised by field rather than experience. While we were encouraged to consider our audience and not make our presentations too specialised, some people seemed to forget this. I did see some really interesting presentations and got to see research in areas I’m totally unfamiliar with – I particularly liked the Norse and Old English presentations – but some presenters completely lost me. However, it did meet its stated aim of showcasing the variety of research happening in the School of English Studies.

So three very different gatherings with somewhat different aims. Nonetheless, I think there are some common factors in having a rewarding conference experience…

  1. Practical things first: if you are anything other than enthusiastically omnivorous (and I really do mean “enthusiastically” and “omnivorous” – have you seen those canapes?), be prepared to compromise when getting food. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, make sure you’re at the front of the queue so curious omnivores don’t go “oooh, those spinach and pine nut tartlets look good, I’ll have one” and wolf them down before you even see a crumb. Fact is, you’re not going enjoy a conference if you’re hungry and cranky, and you’re not going to get much out of it if you’re thinking about where you can get food rather than the implications of diachronic multi-modal corpora.
  2. Drinking can be fun if you’re into that sort of thing, but I can almost guarantee that the thing you really want to go to will be at some ungodly hour the next morning. Presumably you’re old enough to make the choice between hangover, sleeping in and missing the thing you wanted to go to, and limiting your alcohol intake. Choose wisely.
  3. You don’t have to go to everything! Conferences can be quite intense, so it’s fine to miss a presentation or two to give yourself some time to yourself. If there’s nothing on that really interests you, take yourself off for a coffee or have a walk around the venue. At my first conference I felt I had to go to everything and was exhausted by the end of it – now I realise that it’s okay if I don’t.
  4. On the other hand, conferences are also great for discovering new things. They bring together people with expertise in different areas, different views, different areas of interest. It’s an opportunity to find out about things you’d never considered or make new and unexpected connections to your own areas of interest. Go to a few things that sound interesting that you feel you don’t know enough about.
  5. Talk to people! You are, with any luck, surrounded by people who do interesting things. Conferences offer you opening gambits – you can ask people what they thought of that last presentation, ask them something about their own paper, or, if you’re British, complain about the coffee/food/accommodation/weather (I jest). There’s probably something coldly tactical to say about networking and getting your name out there, but at least part of it for me is pure, nerdy joy at talking to people who care about the stuff I care about.

I did have a mental list of other suggestions, like “if you’re going to nap, do so in the back row because it’s not very nice for the speaker to see you dribbling at the front” but that’s probably not very helpful. Anyone else got any conference tips/suggestions/advice?