And I never love England more than when covered in snow

Strathclyde is on a mega death hill - a fairly steep one. (I don't know who thought that was a good idea.) All of this snow - all six inches of it - is making everyone nervous, so I have a snow day today. I can kind of see why they're worried about people falling and dying on the hills. Glasgow Uni is at least flat.

But I have things to do - I'm trying to get as much done as possible before I go home for three weeks. Also, I refuse to take a snow day for less than a foot of snow. So I'm headed here this morning:
Does this make me a New England Weather Snob? You bet.

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.

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.

We mostly work to live, until we live to work

Previously on The Fake Palindrome:
I was fired from my job after working four days. You will recall that in an act of desperation I emailed a bunch of English and Linguistics professors at the nine million colleges near me, offering myself up as an Unpaid Academic Slave. (Does all of this sound unfamiliar? see more here.)

Who would say no to free labor? And - if I can say so - I have a damn impressive academic resume. I am insanely qualified for academic research, which is good, because I think it might be the only thing I am good at! The next day, checking my email, I had a response from a Dr Green at BU. He was on his way to the Biannual Chaucer Conference - it was love at first email.

He's preparing to write an article about Modern English pragmatics and wanted to know if I would be interested in working on a bibliographical survey for him. And, he added - "that would assure you weekly conversations and lunches until your plane leaves. It could be a way to escape the dog days of August." SIGN ME UP! I immediately wrote him back to say yes, and schedule a meeting with him. It might not be paid, but I'll get hang out at BU and Harvard libraries for a month! And it is not sitting on my ass at home, which is a very, very good thing.

***

Once upon a time, back in June, I was a viable job candidate. I had the whole summer ahead of me! I was applying for a bunch of administrative jobs, as I decided I wanted to work in an office. I don't see myself ever working in an office long-term, but it seemed like a good way to spend the summer. They would have AC, I would feel like a Real Person, and I would have some semblance of real-world experience.

Back in June, BBC* had an open position for an administrative assistant/grammarian for Complicated Science Documents Written By Scientists. Aside from Obscure Research, I am also ridiculously qualified to be your In-House Grammarian (even if this blog doesn't always show it!); I sent them my resume with a pretty good cover letter. And then I never heard back from them. So I kind of assumed that it was a lost cause and kept job-searching.

AND THEN THEY E-MAILED ME BACK ASKING ME TO SCHEDULE A INTERVIEW, the day after I had agreed to work with Dr. Green. I can only work part-time until early September. So I guess I am on my way to absolutely blow a job interview today.




*NOT the broadcasting company. This is a company near me; I'm not naming them by name for hopefully obvious reasons.

A Day in the Life

Hello blog friends! I have not forsaken you, I promise. It's just that nothing of extreme interest has happened to me as of late. I was in NH this past weekend; it was great to see many people in a very short span of time. Then I came home and continued to look for a (second?) job.

I also started my next casual research project, which is to prove that the latest Muse album is actually about George Orwell's 1984.

Don't get me wrong, I love being a columnist; it's a lot of fun and gives me an excuse to do things I would normally never do and call it "research" - for example, I watched Game 6 of the NBA finals so I could write this article. I might use it as an excuse to watch all of the World Cup next. However, it's not very lucrative at ALL - I have written 7 articles and made $3.53. I have no idea how people actually make a living as a freelancer. Maybe they don't write for The Examiner. Either way, I'm back to job-hunting. I'm friendly, reliable and smart... anything you throw at me, I will pick up very quickly. Someone please hire me!

Hey everybody, come check out how great I am!

My presentations yesterday went really well. (This is a blog about my thesis right? Guess what - you get to hear more about it!) Unfortunately, my project is not the most self-explanatory thing ever, so even though I had a sweet 32x40 semi-shiny sheet of paper, I usually had to walk people through it. This is fine unless more people show up halfway through my spiel, but I'm not complaining - a lot of my friends dropped by the poster presentation and a whole bunch of people came to my presentation to the English department. Thanks for checking out my work!

My parents The Scientists came up for the day, which provided almost unending entertainment. Some background: My dad is a PhD chemist and my mother is a biochemist who did some early work on the human genome project in Canada. These days they are writing manuals for scientific instruments, but the liberal arts are not their thing. Watching them try not to kill themselves during the four hours of the English Department Honors Conference was hilarious - the better a presentation was, the more they looked like they were going to put hot forks through their eyes. They are very intelligent people, but this is quite simply not what they do.

HIGHLIGHTS:
- Mom and Dad sitting next to Dennis Britton at the English department thesis reading, who is prone to flailing when he gets excited about things - especially the analysis of female and male sexuality in Spencer's The Faerie Queen
(to be honest, that was the longest amount of time I had ever seen Dennis sit still)
- Sarah Sherman, interim honors director for the English department, who was just so over this whole situation. "This is blah blah and they like this. their thesis is about this. sadly, there are still eight more presentation after this." (Not a direct quote, but close.)
- Mary Clark sitting behind me, having a grand time: "Hmmm. I don't think so. hmmm."
- the look on the English department's collective face when I introduced an equation to their lives. HILARIOUS. Luckily, we switched back to words quickly. (Meanwhile, Mom and Dad were celebrating the fact they finally understood something happening.)
- Mom and Dad finally meeting Shelly. Shelly and my mom could possibly be the same person - they have the same mannerisms.

Here is a very picture of me explaining my research to one of my many advisors (left) and my friend Kallie (right)

a time line

Presumably if you've been following my blog lately this post is a little bit unnecessary. But, whatever:


a month ago, I restarted my thesis from word one, page one.
three weeks ago, I started writing thesis 2.0
last week, I had a 17-page first draft
As of Monday afternoon, I sent my URC poster to print
As of yesterday morning, I had a URC poster
Tomorrow I'm presenting my research not once but twice!
and as of this weekend I will have a second draft.

even though the last few weeks have felt like this:

(you probably saw me wandering around campus looking like this)
I am pretty damn proud of myself for accomplishing so much in such a short period of time.

& a month from today i'll be graduating.
how does this happen!?

In my mind, the URC is like a very large-scale science fair. I hope someone brings a paper-mache volcano.

When I signed up for the Undergraduate Research Conference in March, I hadn't planned on having to restart my thesis. I also assumed that a poster presentation would be a fairly straightforward thing, which is why I decided to do a poster presentation AND a thesis reading. This may have been an error in judgment. But, there wasn't much I could do about it.

Last Thursday I very sleep-deprivingly drove to every nearby place that would print a 32x40 semi-gloss professional poster. Due to my tiny department of 35 students and three professors, I was in charge of my own poster. Conveniently, UNH offers these printing services, but they said they needed a 5-7 day turnaround time. This was the 5-7 day turnaround deadline before the URC, and I had nothing to give them. Worried, I went to Kinko's and Staples to get quotes. For the convenience of approximately a 2 hour turnaround time, I would pay nearly three times as much. I had planned on working on my poster the week I got back from spring break. I didn't even start rewriting until two weeks ago.

This weekend I started working on my poster. I sent it to print an hour ago.

To be honest, the nature of my project is that it is quite simply not accessible to everyone. There aren't a lot of pictures which are applicable to native and adopted locative prefixes. It requires a lot of very wordy explanation. There is no way to make this "user-friendly". I tried, believe me. It was a stretch to come up with two graphs.

Helpfully, the last time I used Powerpoint for ANYTHING was middle school, and we all had to make a metaslide that showed we knew how to use powerpoint. I had no idea how to make a poster using it... but there is no time for a learning curve. Luckily for me, someone compiled a How-To. Beverly, my old and rather crotchety computer, decided that this was a good time to let Powerpoint crash every 20 minutes or so. This was frustrating.

But, Shelly approved of my final poster draft while I was in class this afternoon. I ran to get it printed through UNH's copy center, which apparently is three days ahead of schedule and not costing me $92.25 for 32x40 inches of semi-shiny paper with things printed on it. So this is all going very well; much better than anticipated, really.

Dear Dimond Library,

I missed you. I'm glad we're back together for the next few weeks.

Love,
Heather

story of my life.

How many times have you said to yourself, "Oh good, I'm done working on that..." and then continued to stare at a screen of some sort?

PhD comics = academic truth. Sometimes I feel like a grad student already, albeit with infinitely less work.

remember: be here now

I don't think I do enough drugs to fully appropriate Ram Dass' 1971 book Remember: Be Here Now. (Nor do I think I will ever get there.) I'm also not especially interested in meditation or yoga. But lately I've been re-reading this book and remembering to calm down; even though I feel like I'm running out of time and things are going way too fast, it's going to be okay.

intra-research: some thoughts & questions

1. This is the one-year anniversary of my prefix research, sort of; to be honest I don't really remember when the due date for my research proposal was last year, but I recall it being in early March before spring break. (I want to say it was March 5th, but I'm alright with finding something in the middle of the month. I know that my proposal was accepted in early April.) Happy one year, prefixes! It's been fun.

2. speaking of which: HOW IS SPRING BREAK STARTING TOMORROW i'm so confused. I feel like I just careened directly into spring break. After spring break is April, and after April is May. And then my thesis is due, and then I graduate. When did time get faster?

3. Originally my spring break plans involved a presentation of my prefix research at the McGill International Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, but they decided they weren't interested in my cutting-edge research. Their loss... what I'm doing is exciting. So I guess I'm going home for a week. (The downside of living in a dorm is that I occasionally get kicked out of my living space for brief periods of time. It doesn't happen a lot, which is nice; though I really would prefer to stay here so I can keep working - I have a system, and it's been fairly effective. )

4. Who invented peach soda? and why does it not actually taste like peaches?

RE: Thesising

Today I start writing my senior thesis. Sitting next to me is my thesis proposal and a cup of coffee. Time to start working! I took my first personal day of my collegiate career on Tuesday in preparation for this.

I kind of feel like I'm faking it. Like, how did I get here? How is this actually happening now?

The future freaks me out, a lot.

meta-research

I just stumbled upon AN ARTICLE ABOUT MY RESEARCH.

To quote:
"[Laurie Bauer] with two other leading international linguists [Rochelle Lieber and Ingo Plag], will be putting together a book on English morphology – how words are constructed."

I've been doing this research with Shelly Lieber since June 2009. (In fact, as I write this, I SHOULD be researching.) I'm actually working on a portion of this book: prefixes in regards to location and temporality native to English and adopted in from Greek/Latin. I have been in contact with this guy! My mind = BLOWN.

in which my obscure interests ARE ACTUALLY OF MODERATE USE.

I was alarmed too.

Given my well-documented love of all things Anglo-Saxon/Medieval England (I'm only partially kidding) and the Internet, I (of course) was very pleased when the Bayoux Tapestry meme came to be in existence. The other day I was hitting the stumbleupon button while researching and came across this page. I left this page alone for a few days, too mentally fried to deal with it at the time. Research is taxing. Today, upon further review, I realized this page contains a link to a Make-Your-Own tapestry page.

So, naturally, this is all I have done today:









MAKE YOUR OWN HERE

last first first last

Today is the first day of my last semester at UNH. Weird. While everyone is scurrying around campus going to their first day of classes, I'm back to research.

It's sunny and warm for January, and I can't help but think about how much it feels like this past summer.