What am I?

I have more tongues than any one person would know what to do with.

I draw lots and lots of trees.

I am just one of the many strings to Chomsky's bow.

I am a multidisciplinary area of knowledge which dabbles in both the Arts and Humanities, and in the Social Sciences.

And in the last lies a smidgin of a problem.

I (I'm now talking as myself, and not as my subject!) am incredibly lucky to have funding from the ESRC, that's the Economic and Social Research Council, which is the main funding body in the UK for the social sciences. And on Tuesday this week, I went down to my dear alma mater, the University of Sheffield, for my first ESRC event - the launch of the White Rose Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre, the organisation which doles out the funding for Masters and PhD students like me, and for various projects and centres of excellence at the three Yorkshire universities involved (that's Leeds, Sheffield and York, if you were wondering). So far, so good. The event was intended to give us more information about what the WR DTC does (see above), and to talk about ways in which expertise, training and opportunities can be shared across the three institutions. All very admirable indeed. This kind of information, along with (a lot of) glowing examples of existing White Rose collaborative projects took up most of the morning. Not forgetting the glorious addition of a short session by Maria Mawson, Sheffield's social sciences liaison librarian whose suggested resources yielded an awful lot of useful stuff, as librarians' talks tend to. Her session probably was the most useful of the day.

Not a definition, but a defining image:
the wug test...on a mug!
Photo by ninasaurusrex

Indeed, it was the zenith that followed pretty rapidly by a deep, ravine-like nadir when we broke out for the discipline-related "cluster" sessions. Not for all the participants, and it wasn't really the fault of the organisers either, as such. The problem lay in the different ways that the three universities classify linguistics. York takes quite a scientific angle on it, emphasising the empirical and experimental side of things with specialisms in forensic speech science and psycholinguistics - hence why I am at York, and why they offer an ESRC 1+3 scholarship. I don't know about Leeds, but Sheffield seems to take a more artsy view generally, linguistics being all wrapped up with literature and offering lots of joint modules between the two. Both departments are fantastic, but the upshot of all this is that there were no linguists from Sheffield or Leeds, completely knocking out our networking and collaborative opportunities, which was such a shame. Of course, many people found the day to be incredibly useful - some friends of mine in the Politics stream reported some great shared experiences - and I found out that there's some very interesting research going on within Psychology, for example on language processing, so that will be an area to look into in the near future. But I can only hope that future events provide a little more in the way of networking and collaborative opportunities...and that there'll be some more social sciency linguists in Yorkshire in the future!

As a non-linguistic aside, I ran into the library marketing guru himself, Ned Potter a.k.a the Wikiman, in the Harry Fairhurst building (LFA) yesterday, and had a very enjoyable library-themed natter, my first in some time! It's now about six weeks since I left the Classics library and apart from missing Cambridge as a city, there are times when the dynamism of the Cambridge library mafia and the community feeling in Classics me manque, aussi. However, seeing as I'm virtually living in LFA now, library fixes will never be too far away.