a day in the life

Every week or so I go over to Glasgow University. Glasgow University is sort of like the BU or NYU of Glasgow, whereas Strathclyde, which is my school, is more like MIT. Glasgow Uni is this amazing, magical, campusy place (complete with trees!). They've got an English language/linguistics department and a literature department, and their library is amazing, whereas Strathclyde is in the middle of the city centre and much less humanities-oriented. (Basically I have a giant crush on Glasgow University.)




Today I listened to a lecture about relative pronouns in the morning and spent my afternoon reading original texts from the 1600s. While this is not the book I actually read (predictably, the special archives collection won't let me take take pictures); I was actually reading about Early Modern English Women's social roles. Last week I was granted access by Oxford to download their full-text Old English and Middle English databases; which means now I have the entire written (documented) early English corpus on my computer. Also today I met with one of the big people in corpus linguistics and a few weeks ago I met with someone who headed the Oxford English Dictionary's recently-published Historical Thesaurus project, both at Glasgow University.

YOU GUYS HOW IS THIS MY LIFE I DON'T EVEN KNOW

quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock

In case you were curious, the Tour De La Bibliothèques is still ongoing. Here is an illustrated guide to my life as a professional reader.

This is what I am researching, explained with dinosaurs and probably much more helpful than my previous post about it:
(from dinosaur comics by ryan north)


I go to Widener every week or so to get copies of articles to read. I look at an on-line catalog, request items, wait for them to arrive, make photocopies of them, return the items, and repeat. Here I am making sure I have all the pages of one article.
If I want to borrow a book, I have to get Dr. Green to sign it out for me. Then I bring all of this home with me.

During the rest of the week, I come to Wheaton College's library, where I sit in the basement with the history books to read and take notes on my computer. Today I am reading about lying.
Because I am super-nearsighted, I have to wear my glasses when I read. Even though I wear contacts in my daily life, my lenses hypercorrect for distance and then I can't read. As you can imagine, this is counterproductive.

That's it! This is what I do every day instead of having an actual job. There's not much to say about being a research assistant. I don't have to get dressed up or anything; I just sort of sit somewhere, listen to music, and read. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I figured it was time to talk about something other than mail fails.

Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls

I'm not at Harvard every day. I live about an hour away from Boston by train, and that just gets me into the city. Getting to Harvard once I get to Boston is another half an hour or so on the T. Doing that every day would be unnecessary and expensive. (To go to any other school in Boston is kind of equally as inefficient.) I live at the end of a commuter rail, which therefore makes me "near" Boston. In reality I live in what I call Southern Massachusetts, which is not quite South Shore but not quite central MA either, but somewhere between there. I do live very close to Rhode Island; from my house, I can get there in about 10 minutes.

But I do live near a lot of colleges. Between Providence, Worcester, and Boston there are easily around 40 colleges within an hour of me. I am very bad at working at home - I'm easily distracted and really just want to be left alone when I'm working - so I generally just go to one of these schools and use their libraries. Besides Harvard, I've been to a few other schools in the Tour De La Bibliothèques. One school is in my hometown, offering a BA only in dance; it is not very legitimate. The other is Wheaton College, which is about a half-hour drive from me and a lot more legit. I spent a couple of afternoons at BU, too. Most of the time I work at Wheaton College, because it is probably the closest to me and offers more than one Bachelor's degree.

If you spend enough time on college campuses, you quickly realize that they are all exactly the same. Did you guys go on a million college tours when you were in high school? I did - I think I visited something like 10 or 12 colleges. And at each one, someone very charming and friendly would lead you around: This is the student union. Here is our library, with many books. Here is our gym! That giant pile of construction supplies is going to be our New Science Complex! Here is a dorm, people live here. You could live here, if you come to our AWESOME SCHOOL BECAUSE WE ARE THE BEST. It's all about selling someone on what sets this one school apart from the 83 million other schools you could apply to.

In the Northeast, at least, a college campus seems to be fairly uniform. There's a bunch of brick buildings with some white trim or accent. These are neat and orderly and usually organized in a line of sorts - around a quad, perhaps. There's at least one hypermodern building that looks super out of place, with weird glass and angles. Sometime in the 1960s-1970s, every school had a lot of money to (re)build stuff, so there is a collection of fairly horrible concrete monstrosities somewhere; some of them are a mix of bricks and concrete. There might be a bunch of repurposed houses scattered around.

Does this sound like your campus? Probably. It's kind of comforting, actually, to know that the collegiate experience is pretty much the same everywhere you go. Walking around Wheaton or BU or even Harvard feels exactly the same as walking around UNH. Walking around BU this summer was strange because I felt like I had already gone there for years, even though its citiness had turned me off five years ago. I definitely love the way that UNH is set up, but I think could love the way any campus is set up.

No matter how it ends, no matter how it starts

How's research going? It's alright. I don't know very much about pragmatics, which could be accurately described as "linguistic philosophy". Linguistics is heavily based in logic - it's sort of like math, but with words. Philosophy is also - predictably - heavily based in logic. The study of pragmatics in linguistics focuses contextualizing language for both the speaker and the hearer using philosophy of language. I am basically reading about the logic of language - specifically how logical arguments construct context. As Dr. Green's research assistant, my job is to read articles and books about pragmatics and take notes on them, summarizing their arguments.

I've never taken a class on logic, which is therefore making this more difficult than it has to be. I basically failed every math class ever from algebra onwards, and therefore was not very pleased to find out I had a math requirement in college. I had the option of Finite Math or Logic. Figuring that I had at least taken Algebra variations something like 6 times, I would sign up for Finite Math and try really hard to not fail. (I scraped by with a C+. I was very proud of myself.)

I do have a basic idea of how sets work, and I know how to read syntactical analyses and I understand how surface vs deep structures work in language, but I don't know how to read logic problems. This is, of course, a major hinderance in progress. I have been reading about propositional logic and kind of staring blankly at proofs like (this is a real example taken from one of my texts):

1)
a. Sam wants Fido.
b. What Sam wants is Fido.
c. It is Sam who wants Fido.

2)
a. Wants (Sam,Fido)
b. λx(Wants (Sam,x))(Fido)
c. λx(Wants (x,Fido))(Sam)

3) It is Fido that Sam wants.
3a) λx(Wants (Sam,x))(Fido)
4) Who wants Fido is Sam.
4a) λx(Wants (x,Fido))(Sam)

Heather wants fewer parenthesis. But I am fairly certain that I am supposed to understand that these are varieties of ways to say that "Sam wants Fido", and they are perfectly clear in every context. Something that would not be clear (comparatively speaking to Sam & Fido) is "Noam likes bats" (What kind of bats? flying bats? baseball bats? an otherwise non-defined bat? What if 'bats' is an acronym for Bad Ass Tattoos? etc etc). I am either reading about logic, ambiguity, or both. This goes on for pages. The first article I read was 30 pages about how the sentence "I love you" is perfectly contextual and logically sound as it has a subject (I), a verb (love) and a referent object (you).

In case you were curious, all of it is this ridiculous. (The pragmatists would hate that sentence.) Although context is important because it tells us what is happening in the sentence so we can go on to presuppose and imply things accordingly based on what we understand to be true, the pragmatists are champs at stretching context a little bit too far - Bad Ass Tattoos? Come on now.

For the most part though, I do get it...it just takes some time. A lot of the logical arguments I'm given look a lot like the ones above, and they are pretty straightforward. It's when you give me symbols like ¬, ∀, ⊕, and ⊢ that I have no idea what you are talking about. I can't even guess what "∀x" would mean - I have been relying heavily on Wikipedia's Basic Logic Symbols page as a reference and hoping I am kind of right in my analysis. Maybe when I finish this research I will have a basic working knowledge of logic.

i am a visitor here; i am not permanent

Monday was Day 2 of Research at Harvard! Since I do not actually go to Harvard, I have really limited access to their resources. Though I have the privilege of merely being in this building, even if it is for such a short, short time, I am not really allowed to do very much. If I want to see something, I have to request it; about two hours later someone will deliver it to me. (I like to think there are library elves involved.) I usually interact with about two library staff members maximum.

As a "visiting academic" (that's really strange to say; do I even qualify for that title?) this there are only so many things that you can expect me to know. The floor plan, for instance, is not one of them, especially when you are allowed in a room and a half. Since I don't have stacks privileges, I have no idea where the books I am requesting are. I know a lot of them are generally rather localized in one place based on their call numbers, but I don't know where this place is. It's part of the mythical, forbidden places in the building!

So you can imagine my surprise when one of the librarians came back to my desk in the reading room with two of my request slips and said "You can go get these yourself." What?! I can only be in here and in the bathroom! YOU CAN'T GIVE ME THAT SORT OF POWER.

It turns out that I'm allowed to be in a few more places than I originally suspected, including "up the stairs and in the big reading room". This room holds the most commonly accessed books and big huge mega tables for everyone to use. I guess this makes sense. Apparently everyone with access to the library has access to this room; it's in all of their publications about Widener, so I guess it's a kind of famous room. Kind of a shame, because the rest of the library is, in my opinion, way more beautiful than this one room. (The reading room I'm usually in is full of white stone and mahogany wood fixtures with stainless steel accents. We have a giant skylight above us. It is gorgeous.) But it's kind of like saying you like one palace over another... they're both gorgeous in their own way.

Just to get to this other room you have to go up a MARBLE STAIRCASE. However, nobody works in that room to help you, which is why there would be no point to me spending my time there. The library elves wouldn't be able to collect my resources for me.

Later I found out that I'm not granted access to one of the documents I requested that morning. I was sent to another room (Three rooms in one day! so exciting) and one of the librarians took pity on me. She is arranging for me to get special access to this one document! I have to wait for this request to go through, and I will probably have to bring latex gloves to make sure that I don't ruin it with fingerprints or something.

On my lunch break I half-listened to a campus tour guide brag about how she had been in Widener once. Harvard's campus tours won't bring them anywhere near the library the undergrads are allowed into, but they will bring you in front of Widener! Ha ha, kiddos, I AM ALLOWED IN WIDENER...for four more days this year!

Use your education and take an educated guess

You are probably all on the edges of your seats waiting to hear about Harvard. Am I right? HA! I knew it.

I didn't have any problems getting access to Widener. In order to be granted Library Privileges, I had to bring a letter from my public library stating that my needs as a scholar do not exist outside this one building. I was granted Reading Room privileges as expected, which means I am allowed in exactly one and a half rooms in this giant, beautiful library: the reading room and the bathroom (a bathroom doesn't count as a real room in my book; it's a little past the circulation desk, so I guess we'll call that space "half a room"). Apparently I am also allowed in a computer lab if I am not bringing a computer with me; because I am bringing my laptop that has been nullified.

Anyway, this is what my Harvard University ID looks like. (Please appreciate my terrible haircut.) I am allowed into Widener Research Library for 6 days per 12 month period. So even though this card expires a year from now, I have five more days in this library. A day is 24 hours from original swipe-in, so I am allowed to leave for lunch and whatnot. This does not quite factor in the fact that this library is not open 24 hours a day, but no matter. This is Harvard, they can do what they like.

In the humanities (or "Not-Science"), the word "research" usually is translated into "reading a lot of things." The professor I'm working for - an ancient man with an adorably out-of-date laptop - presented me with a 46 page bibliography and told me to look through it and select what I wanted to read. From there, I would find these texts in the library catalog. I am not allowed in the stacks (if you want a study carrel you have to apply for that too. This place does not fuck around!), so I have to request individual journals to make photocopies of the articles. I can request up to 10 things per hour; I don't know if anyone actually achieves this over the course of a day. Dr Green has borrowing privileges, so if I want to take any books out to bring home, he has to do it for me. He is very nice about this, if not very deaf; the rest of the Reading Room was not very pleased whenever we talked.

I spent the morning getting used to their library catalog and generally making a mess of my to-find list. You guys, this is what research was like before the internet! I filled out a bunch of request forms and looked up more things. I've used a lot of the journals listed in this bibliography... and I remembered that I didn't have to go to the Dimond Library to do so. It turns out that a few of these journals are available online through JSTOR! (Un?)surprisingly, you need a Harvard logon to use their JSTOR access, but through UNH's blackboard portal I can still use these resources. DEAR EVERYONE AT UNH: BLACKBOARD DID SOMETHING RIGHT FOR A CHANGE. WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THAT. IT'S CONFUSING RIGHT?

I was still waiting for my earlier requests to come through, so I took a lunch break. I don't know Cambridge well, so I ended up going across the street to Qdoba and bringing my lunch back to Harvard Yard. In the maybe 30 minutes I was out there, no less than six people assumed I was a Harvard student and asked me for directions. I am pleased that I look appropriately collegiate.

When I came back, my requests had come through, so I now had the daunting task of remembering why I wanted them and making photocopies. I would just like to throw it out there how happy I am that UNH put all of our information on just one card; I have a separate card from Dr Green just for printing/photocopying. It took me three different documents to figure out that the copier auto-double-sides everything. This copier had a very effective guide of how it worked (COPIES COME OUT HERE, COLLATED PAGES GO IN HERE, MORE PAPER IS AVAILABLE AT THE DESK ASK FOR HELP etc) - clearly they realize that while the world's premiere academics can think about complex things they (we?) cannot handle Xerox machines.

Anyway, Dr Green had to run off to a meeting for the afternoon, so I ended up leaving Widener around 3 pm with three books, six articles, and a fairly infinite number of articles available on-line. Basically I do not have to be in Boston every day (which is a life saver, waking up at 5 am just to get into Boston around 8 was going to kill me!) However, I am now officially calling August the Tour De La Bibliothèques while I read and take notes. On Wednesday I read thirty pages about the sentence "I love you" on my way home; Thursday I camped out in my town's sometimes-commmunityesque college and brushed up on doing pragmatics.

Doing pragmatics is serious business.