Mickey Mouse Linguistics
Well, I have returned from the LSA meeting in Anaheim to my humble abode, and have rediscovered: temperate weather, potable tap water, people who don’t study linguistics.
As I was there, I swear it seemed like the meeting last year, in Albuquerque, had just taken place a few weeks before. In particular as I headed down to the bloggers’ dinner (which was well-attended), I could clearly remember the southwestern cuisine served at the restaurant where we had at the same event the previous year. But at the same time, the experience was much different than the previous two LSAs I’d attended. For one, I was actually delivering a paper, which was a change. For another, I had about a dozen hours of (unmentionable) linguistics-related activities to attend to, all of which precluded visiting many talks. I managed to get in about half a dozen or so, though I wish I’d attended at least two times that many.
I learned a few things about using a handout, as opposed to slides. For one thing, certain items will attract attention no matter what (say, pie charts). So no matter how much you say you’ll get to something later, or that something isn’t crucial to the discussion, if you’ve got pie charts, people will look at them. So if you mention the charts before you actually want to get to them, people will look, and then they won’t pay attention to the lead-up to the charts. What does this mean? They don’t actually understand the significance of the charts. [feel free to replace any item that might be included on a handout] So, future presentations of the data should probably be done differently. For another thing, and this might be truly obvious, get the handout done prior to leaving for the conference. Unfortunately for the LSA, it’s near the holidays and so sometimes, when co-authoring, such is not always possible. But in any case, the point is to get the copying done before you have to submit to whatever the copying shops near the hotel have to offer (and they no doubt do know that you are desperate).
Finally, beware people cruising down wide promenades near Disneyland. They might throw a cup of ice at a group of linguists and have it barely miss one of them by mere centimeters, hitting a car behind them. So be careful out there.