Happy New Year, Happy New Researching

2013. Doesn't look quite right yet, does it? I personally think that it looks like it has more get-up-and-go then 2012, but there is no good reason behind this, apart from a slight tendency towards synaesthesia (the number 5 is pink and fluffy, don'tcha know? Though it looks a lot scarier when attached on the end of 2015, where it signals THE END OF MY STUDENT CAREER. Hopefully.)

Ahem. In any case, if there's a bit of energy (perceived or otherwise) knocking around, I am determined to make the most of it. The end of last term left me on the ropes, the blurry and half-formed face of my Quasimodo thesis staring down at me from a great height and just about ready to put the boot in, before Father Christmas scooped me up, up and away (at least as far as Chester). I am not at all delirious, but merely cognisant of the ever-changing, glowering beast that the PhD experience can seem to be, which differs so greatly from the in-yer-face and away-you-go whirlwind MA year. I have so far learnt:

• Literature reviews are blimmin' hard to start, when you're trying to coherently group the 21 sources you have so far pored through in great detail
• Even 1st year exam marking has its charms, when there's another chapter that needs reading
• There is no perfect starting point. Every answer throws up at least three more questions
• Fixed deadlines are beautiful, rare jewels that I never appreciated when I had them, and which I greatly miss now
• Teaching is awesome and will keep you sane, even if it continues to induce stomach churning and unnecessary sweating every other Wednesday morning

The view at my desk...a bit post-it note heavy, but it works!
Also very pleasant to be able to survey the wildlife from time to time.

There's just a few pearls of wisdom (read:garbage) for you on the back of one term's PhDing. It seems that the main themes running through this are the need to avoid isolating yourself, and knowing how to make massive jobs into itty-bitty-manageable ones. Here's my plans for dealing with these issues:

Avoid isolating yourself

• Ensure that daily lunches with lovely linguists (happily no syntacticians, so no fear of chatting shop) continue this term
• Continue to revel in teaching, without using it as a distraction tactic
• Keep finding fellow syntacticians and semanticists to bounce off, even if κύριε καθηγητά is off doing exciting things in Boston 

Breaking down massive tasks

• Post-it notes. As anyone who has seen my desk knows, it's ALL about the post-it notes. And they genuinely do help
• Don't expect to get things perfect (e.g. the literature review in the perfect order, or the ideal abstract structure) first time. Drafts are not only OK, they're a blimmin' good idea
• ...following on from the point above, getting words onto paper (real or digital) is GOOD. My head just won't hold all this information on its own, no matter how hard I try...so why am I trying?
• Reading must be punctuated by thinking. Otherwise it won't go in, and I won't get anything original out of it anyway. GET AWAY FROM THE LAPTOP MORE FREQUENTLY!
• Creating deadlines for myself. Be it a supervisor meeting, a postgrad conference abstract submission to get me motivated about a bigger conference's deadline, I need motivation, and this is the most effective way for me to get it

I don't think that all these things are possible all of the time, and I'll find other ways and means of dealing as the year goes on. But as I am fortunate enough to have good people around me, and little gems of projects showing up from time to time, I think I'll be OK. And that will do for the meantime.

The Dark Side of the PhD: The LaTeX Edition

Despite the somewhat suggestive title of this post, this is not going to be some kind of "50 Shades of Doctoral Study". Instead, in what may or may not become a mini-theme, I'm going to look at one of the hidden difficulties I've so far come across in my PhD; namely, learning how to use the LaTeX program for word processing.

For the uninitiated (and titillated), LaTeX, pronounced [leɪtɛk], is a word processing program which involves using packages and codes to produce documents. It is therefore much less straightforward than a program like Microsoft Word, but produces some very attractive syntax trees, equations and formatting which isn't likely to go straight to hell the moment you open the document on a different computer. Or, as Hannah put it:

LaTeX is a computer programme put on this planet to taunt linguists with its promise of beautifully formatted documents while preventing any chance of making one thanks to endless reams of complex code needed to get there. Guaranteed to make you want to hurl your computer out of a window, but when it works, a hallelujah chorus sounds and everything is wonderful once more.

Which is pretty accurate, really.

Anyway. Learning LaTeX is clearly a necessity, not least because el supervisor is something of a devotee and I, in a paroxysm of boot-licking, promised to use LaTeX for all future documents.

Cue the long, long slog to LaTeX nirvana. First step was trying to drag up from the back of my memory any of the starter stuff I learnt during my MA. Second step was remembering just how important EVERY slash and parenthesis is. Third step was attempting to create a bibliography for the first time. Fourth step was being reminded again JUST HOW IMPORTANT EVERY SLASH AND PARENTHESIS IS.

And rinse and repeat. To spare you the details, I now, with a little help from Moe, Robert, Ruwayshid, Luke and myriad Google searches, have an attractive, well-aligned, Harvard-referenced document just begging to be read. Here's a couple of links that I found useful:

• http://tex.stackexchange.com/ - Forum with a vast amount of very knowledgeable users. Especially if you're starting out, you can be pretty sure that your question has already been answered here.
• http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/ - A cheatsheet to help you out with the basic structural bits. I've downloaded it to my desktop for instant easy access (and it is ALWAYS open)
• http://merkel.zoneo.net/Latex/natbib.php - A run-down of commands for use with the natbib bibliography package, making citing easier.

...and there's so many more that I haven't mentioned or haven't yet found, so keep searching and let me know if you find any other corkers.

Now I just have to go and make the content of the document in question as good as its formatting...

Conference Mk II

So it would appear I'm becoming something of a conference fiend, as I attended my second in two months at the start of November - namely the Manchester Salford New Researchers Forum in Linguistics. Of course the whole point of endless conferences, other than getting your name about, is to learn something new each time - so what was different?

• The "warm-up"! As there were 5 Yorkies going to Manchester, we decided to combine forces to present our papers to the department before throwing ourselves to the conference lions. Three of us were able to present...and subsequently got rinsed by the department. Actually, that's not fair - our audience focused on the areas in which we could improve, which was crucial so that we could give the best possible accounts of ourselves. Shame there wasn't quite enough time to get onto the positives though we were assured that there were plenty of positives, and we all agreed that our papers were much the better for having that first airing.
• Collaboration! This time round, I had a co-presenter, the lovely Samir from Sheffield via Exeter. My MA thesis was based to a certain extent on his, so we decided to combine forces (and data) to hit our listeners with 40 - yes, that's FORTY - simultaneous bilingual children, 15 French-English and 25 German-English and their very best dative constructions. This was an interesting challenge, not least because Exeter is a blimmin' long way from York, but also because I was much more familiar with the material than Samir, having worked more recently on both projects. I therefore took responsibility for the early slide drafts, which Samir then fine-tuned. We also both learnt a lot about the pros and cons of using Skype to collaborate and practice - verdict? Largely very useful, as long as you can find a quiet-but-not-silent area to go to, though the face-to-face practice the morning of the talk was invaluable.
• A new topic! As I hinted above, we were presenting on a combination of our two MA theses, which were both about the acquisition of dative alternation by simultaneous bilingual children. An acquisition talk involves less hardcore formal theory than my LAGB talk, but in some ways demands a much more careful approach when interpreting results. We also had to account for a large range of factors in our methodology, such as the socioeconomic status of our participants and the ways in which we tested participants' proficiencies.
• 10 minutes fewer! At the LAGB, I wittered my half-hour talk in under 20 minutes. At the MancSalFiL, our allotted 20 minutes were filled to the brim - it's always MUCH harder to be concise than verbose...

Cupcakes (like this one) make conferences
brighter. Image from dreamstime.com

And the outcome? We were really pleased with the way our talk was received, and benefited from a wide range of different perspectives, as we had syntacticians, pragmatics and even the odd sociolinguist offering their very welcome thoughts. Hours spent on Skype turned out to be very well spent, and we think the delivery was pretty smooth, if we do say so ourselves! Here are the slides if you fancy a look yourself.

Furthermore, the entire conference itself was hugely useful for networking, looking at how other people approach their work, and an exceedingly useful careers panel from four kind, willing victims volunteers. Not to mention the aforementioned volunteers' cracking plenary talks, a constant haze of enthusiasm and some insanely good cupcakes. Well done to everyone involved, especially the three amazing organisers.

Best way to get to know your new colleagues?
A trip to Evil Eye

Good times all round, which seem set to continue, largely. There have been enough highlights so far in my 5-week-old PhD to balance out all the reading - in particular my seminar teaching, some cracking new colleagues and a new side project I'm working on with my supervisor George...more to come on that another time though.

And just before I leave you - it's official - I got a Distinction in my MA. Very pleased indeed :D

Now it just remains to try to write again before December...

Feeling fresh for a fifth Freshers' Week?

Technically, this is my fifth Freshers' week (it's my sixth year in tertiary education, but one of these was spent working in a high school in France, so I missed out on the revelry that year).

I'm feeling fairly fresh, in that late September/early October always signifies a new start for me, be it a new city, a new home, or a new course - this year, shock horror, only the last one is true, as I embark upon my PhD. As soon as the leaves take on a russet hue and the light jackets come out, I feel like something new is starting. I also have three new housemates, a new haircut, and a renewed vigour for York post-holiday to Germany and France.

However, it's a raggedy kind of start to a new year, seeing as there's quite a bit to mop up from the MA - I've spent today writing a summary of my dissertation to send out to all the parents and schools who were so wonderfully helpful with lending me their children, and I am now exceedingly motivated to turn my and Samir's dissertations into one entity, as our joint talk at the MancSalFiL is now officially on the program, and as such is officially just 33 days away. I've also had the pleasure of a little side work in doing some style editing for the journal Iberia, as a result of meeting the excellent Ángel at last month's LAGB conference.

As for the start of the PhD, it's currently enshrouded in a haze of unknownness. To be fair, term hasn't officially started yet, so I'm not exactly behind before I've started. But for the first time, I really don't know what I'm getting into - my days of taught tertiary education are now firmly behind me, and research is my future, but I don't know where to start with my (fairly vague) proposal, whether I do have any lectures or training sessions, or when I'll next interact with a colleague face to face.

I guess that, for the moment, I just need to focus on the projects I still have to do, and not worry too much about the PhD just yet. After all, I'll have three years to worry about it, starting at the welcome meeting on 10th October...

Building tools and medieval games as the perfect pedagogical metaphors...

Librarians across the UK seem to be a very active bunch at the moment, and we were lucky enough to entice a couple of the busiest from the University of Northampton to Cambridge on Thursday to talk to us about their work. Hannah Rose and Heather McBryde-Wilding have been working on how to improve the “first-year experience”  - that is, how first years at university are introduced to the working ways of the library and how it can benefit them and their work. As a result they have improved student satisfaction by up to 11%, published their findings and methods here and have been appointed University Teaching Fellows (floppy hats, robes and all) at their institution.

The whole article is well worth a read, and it’s also worth pointing out that their model of “transitional bridging” (p.21 of the article) is being rolled out university-wide, such has been its success in the domain of information literacy. But there were two things in particular that I wanted to focus on:

Scaffolding

One of the reviewers’ criticisms of the researchers’ methodology was that increased contact with the students and more extensive materials was patronising and tantamount to spoon-feeding the students. In response, the researchers found this definition of ‘scaffolding’

Building on instruction. Picture here

"An important aspect of scaffolding instruction is that the scaffolds are temporary. As the learner’s abilities increase the scaffolding provided by the more knowledgeable other is progressively withdrawn. Finally the learner is able to complete the task or master the concepts independently."
Chang et al, 2002 cited in Van der Stuyf 2002, p.2

In short – the learner needs more help at the start because the subject is completely new, then becomes increasingly independent as their knowledge increases. This was reflected in the amount of resources listed in a first-year guide compared with a second-year guide; in the latter, new aspects were introduced but in such a way that the learner can draw on knowledge already gained in first-year to expand upon new information independently. It might seem obvious, but some academics in particular seem to forget how great the transition is between high-school and university, and how much subject-specific knowledge they take for granted, moving onto my second point of interest…

Having “tame academics” onside

Is academia like chess?  On so many levels

Without support from the academics, the librarian’s work is an uphill battle. Incomprehensible reading lists, obscure abbreviations, not to mention a lack of any clarity regarding referencing conventions leave students (and librarians, sometimes) at a complete loss. After all, as Helen Webster of CARET pointed out, teaching someone the rules of chess does not mean they have been spoon-fed all the possible combinations, outcomes and complexities of the game. But when academics do get involved, and even integrate information literacy into their course, the outcome can be drastically different in terms of the confidence of the students and the quality of their work, as Rose and McBryde-Wilding’s research showed. It certainly worked at Sheffield, where the wonderful Penny Simons, rather than giving us a “must-read” bibliography, took an hour out of each module to give us the key to all the medieval French resources you could possibly wish to read. And here is the result of her approach…

I’m in danger of becoming a broken record with my love of collaboration, but this is interesting in particular because it’s academics collaborating with librarians working in tandem with individual learners, pooling all their expertise to create better quality, stressless(ish) work. Good times.

And today's round-up...

--The UK coalition government is warned that it needs to stick to its environmental pledges by Greenpeace and RSPB amongst others

--Manchester City face Stoke City in the FA Cup Final

--Boy band Blue will be representing the UK in tonight's Eurovision competition in Düsseldorf...you're braver than I am if you try to predict the outcome!

"The move to co-working is a move from a culture of me to a culture of we"...

...says Rachel Botsman, author of "What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption."

An example of collaboration at Libraries@Cambridge 2011.
Photo: Annie Johnson

In my last post, I was looking at how increased awareness and use of social media and electronic resources is a vital aspect of collaborative working in academia today. But I was heartened to find, later the same day, an article which flagged up how, no matter how tech-savvy you are, sometimes you just need the personal touch.

There are an increasing number of motivated, interested and interesting people who make their livelihoods online and independently via Twitter, blogs and other resources such as Teuxdeux.com, and in fact it is the founders of this latter site who felt that their lonely working style was beginning to hamper the very thing at the core of their business: creativity. The solution? 26 unconnected, unrelated people hiring a shared office space and continuing their independent projects; surrounded by like-minded people in the physical world just as they are in the virtual world.

I recommend reading the article itself for a bit more detail and some very interesting comments from the people involved, but this struck a chord with me personally on a number of levels. As a languages student I always valued a really encouraging and stimulating atmosphere within my classes, as there's very little point in learning a language if you can't find anyone to converse with. I also engaged in many more group projects in my final undergraduate year than in previous years: although we were all working towards a shared goal, I feel that I personally got a lot more out of my studies that year in terms of theory and interpretation as well as sheer pleasure in learning. This year too, I know I would not have benefited from my Cambridge experience half as much without my excellent colleagues (who encouraged inquiry, new ways of thinking and my own personal development) or my fellow trainees (LibrariesAtCambridge 2011, anyone?)

I recognise that being able to connect quickly and efficiently with people at a distance is important, as is the capacity that the internet has for allowing you to make connections that you may never have dreamt of and which may not have been possible through any other medium. However, we must never lose sight of the fact that we were designed for face-to-face communication, that, as human beings, we are meant to communicate on levels which go deeper than the words we produce. This is reflected not only in a white office space in Brooklyn, but in new libraries and research spaces across the academic spectrum, which are increasingly incorporating group spaces and a variety of working environments within their walls.

John Donne noted in 1624 that "No man is an island" and finally, in 2011, we're once more realising that a screen is a facilitator of, but not a substitute for, face to face interaction with our peers.

And in the news today...
--The British Government announce plans to fine dangerous drivers with
on-the-spot penalties.
--Ticket prices for the London Paralympic Games are announced (they're much
cheaper than the Olympic ones, a bargain price for a good show!)
--Discussions over Syria's entry onto the UN Human Rights Council continue
despite persistent violence in the region.

P.S. I'll be getting some real face-to-face feedback in just over a week, when I'll be talking at the Classics Faculty Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar about "New theories in Psycholinguistics and their application to the study of classical Linguistics". Or something along those lines. Wish me luck!