bill.journee.org

Keep Bill in Townsville

So, I’ve been in Townsville for a year now…

…and it’s been great. I’m loving the weather, the people, the weather, the beaches, the city. Pretty much everything. (Did I mention the weather isn’t bad?). I’ve been freelancing web and graphic design for that time, and while it’s fun and interesting it’s not completely satisfying me. That’s where you come in. Can you help me find a job?

What am I looking for?

I need to find a job and I want to hear what you think. I’m looking for ideas, leads, really anything that can help me!

I’m sure new and exciting directions await, so bring ‘em on.

My current experience is based around:

• Graphic design for print and web (see mr.billi.am)
• Website creation (using WordPress primarily)
• Light remote server administration
• Social media

That said, I’m happy to try completely new directions. I’m flexible and interested in just about everything.

What can I offer?

• Experience in social media and web design, among other things. You can check out my résumé here.
• A desire to apply myself and to learn and discover new things.
• Bachelor of Arts (with first class honours) with majors in English and linguistics as well as honours in linguistics.

How can you help?

Have a look over my LinkedIn account then contact me on Twitter, or send me your suggestions by commenting on this blog post or emailing me at b@journee.org. If you want to talk face to face, drop me a line. You can also catch me at the tweetup I founded in Townsville, @tsvtweetup.

You can download my résumé here.

If you’re really a masochist, I can even send you my honours thesis.

…

So, I failed dismally at updating this blog more often. Go team Billiam!

I think the problem I have at the moment is that my life is interesting enough to tweet, but not interesting enough to expand into something longer, like a blog post. The upside of this is that you don’t need to read rambling run on sentences that make little sense and don’t lead anywhere; a bit like this one. Nectarine.

Anyway, at some point in the near future I’m going to write a couple of posts about how much I love Townsville; it’ll be thrilling.

Lamingtons.

5 Things You Probably Know About Me

Extensive statistical analysis of polling conducted over the last few weeks has revealed that I’m the only person who looks at this blog. This is good news – my readership is on the up!

It also means I can indulge in the counterpoint to Jade Craven‘s powerful and thought provoking post, 14 Things You (Probably) Don’t Know About Me, with my own post. Better still, since I’m the only person that reads this (cf. extensive statistical analysis) none of these things will come as a surprise. Happy days. Since I’m boring and don’t want to read so much about myself, I’ve also trimmed this post down to 5 points.

At this stage I would also like to point out Christopher Lane‘s response to Jade’s post, Facx Aboot Meh!, which is probably what you were after if you’re not me and stumbled on this post. Run now, while you still can.

1. There’s a cupboard in my unit that I forgot existed for over a month.

I moved to Townsville in early March, moved into a unit, and pretty much had to buy all the basics of life to fill up the unit. Who am I kidding? I had the basics of life – a computer. I just needed all that other incidental stuff that fits around the computer.

My unit has a small kitchen, and I noticed on the day I moved in that one of the cupboards smelled funny. Then I forgot about it. Not the smell, that is, I mean the cupboard. This was the 6th of March.

Fast forward to the 20th of April, I was brushing my teeth and getting ready to go to bed and suddenly thought “I think I have another cupboard in my kitchen.” So I walked to the kitchen, and sure enough, a cupboard. My question to you (me) is this: how the hell can you forget about a whole cupboard? For over a month?

2. I don’t like onion.

If you’ve known me for any length of time (as I have!) you’ll know that I have a passionate distaste for onion. I really wish this wasn’t the case, because it’s very, very problematic when it comes to…well, food.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “He doesn’t drink AND doesn’t eat onion? Party pooper!” (Oh wait, did I forget to mention I don’t drink either? Oh well, consider yourself warned). However, now that I’m cooking for myself the vast majority of the time, it’s not such a problem. I just don’t put onion into most things I cook (*collective gasp*). Yes, that works just fine, really. I don’t like onion, so amazingly enough removing it from meals doesn’t actually ruin them for me as most people seem to think when they first hear of this radical action.

3. I really enjoy cooking, but rarely follow recipes. So far, so good.

Since I moved to Townsville I’ve been experimenting with cooking different things. I’ve always cooked a bit, but living away from home means I’m cooking for myself most of the time and that’s no bad thing.

As Jade discovered, I make a mean cake, but I’ve been experimenting with the basics of the repertoire lately: bread, pasta and pastry. A delicious foray into the carbohydrate laden world of flour. This is definitely a work in progress, but so far so good.

4. I’m going to go back to university to do a PhD in linguistics.

I’m sure this is easy enough to guess since my language are so good. My trip to Townsville was all about taking a break, taking stock, and making sure it’s what I really wanted to do. I mean, 3 years is a long time and all, but it’s essentially a career choice too; experts in language endangerment generally don’t stray too far from the academic tree, so to speak.

So, I just need to think of a topic and/or language to do my PhD thesis on (which will be my focus next year, along with moving back to Melbourne and turning my current work into a part-time income). Easy. [Insert sniggers here]

5. Social Media Solutions is the second business I’ve been involved in founding.

The first business I founded was with my friend Matt and a graphic designer. It was called Crazy Crazy. I miss that name. I mean, Social Media Solutions has the professional appeal and the awesome branding, but Crazy Crazy had crazy. And a monkey. I’m afraid Social Media Solutions can’t compete on that front.

Anyway, there’s actually not a lot to say about that business. It was an amazing learning experience, and made me a lot more aware of how the business world operates before I got into the industry post-uni with Social Media Solutions.

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So, that’s it. It all seems a but anticlimactic now, and it was originally meant to be 14 points, but I had two options: let this blog fester while I tried to think of 14 interesting things about myself, or post something. So, enjoy your something!

I’d also love to hear interesting things about anyone who happens to find this blog. My magic 8 ball says that’s unlikely. Don’t get me started on magic 8 balls though.

Reviving a dead horse

So, here. Well, here I am. I doubt any of the 3 people who read this blog are still with me after 14 months.

I stopped blogging last time because I realised that between actually doing my thesis and everything, I couldn’t handle the next step of getting meta about my thesis in extended form on here. On the other hand (in hindsight) it was a great way to get some perspective on the bigger issues of what I was doing.

That was last year, though, and this is this year. So far, this year has been almost completely linguistics free. In part, that’s because I’ve moved to Townsville, and Townsville is a fairly linguistics free place. In part, it’s because I needed a break, so when I sit down to decide on a PhD topic some time in the coming months I’ll have a fresh mind.

In the meantime, I’m going to start blogging again. Like before, I’ll blog about any number of things, including but not limited to language, the media, politics, and the web (I’m doing web design now, did I tell you? I’m also part of Social Media Solutions!)

Where I can I’ll also try and draw them into some kind of lucid storyline.

Butternut pumpkin.

Thesis: Change of game plan

I haven’t updated my blog for a while partially because I’ve been very busy (if you’re here via Twitter, you’ll probably be laughing about now) and because I’ve actually not had much to say about my thesis. After having a quiet nervous breakdown about the quality of the data as I hinted in the last blog post, I got down to the business of trying to work with the data I had.

By and large, the quality of the photocopies themselves is fine, and I can get most if not all the typed and written notes on the page. Or at least, I can see the letters and diacritics and such to a level that means I can type the stuff out. The problem now is that since the records I’m working with in those sets of data are so old, they predate the standardization of Yanyuwa spelling and orthography. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were translations I could work with, but since I don’t speak the language I’m working on, I can’t read the stuff out to get a better sense of what’s being written, and nothing in the data matches the dictionary. In short, even though most of the data isn’t actually destroyed beyond recognition, it’s of very little interest without having a very good understanding of the language to be able to interpret just what is being done in the data.

Enter my new plan: As I’ve mentioned earlier, I intended to work with data spanning from the very beginning of study in Yanyuwa in the 60s, through to most recent data available. Since the data from the 60s through to the mid-80s is effectively useless to me, at least for the moment, I’m moving onto working with the newer data which is in the standard orthography.

At the moment, I’m working on the basis that this will be my only real source of data. Instead of looking at the data over time as was originally intended, this means that I’ll be looking at the data and comparing it to the complexity of kinship terminology found in the dictionary compiled based on all the extant data on the language. Although this is not ideal, it is a much more realistic goal than trying to learn the whole language to begin to understand the data in the early material. Either that or I have to ask John Bradley to translate large amounts of data for me, which isn’t fair on him and isn’t really moving my own research skills further in the process. If I continue working with Yanyuwa at some point in the future then as a matter of urgency I would endevour to have all of this data preserved in a standardised form, although this would involve a large amount of time and effort to do.

Until then, I’ll keep plugging away with what I’ve got.

First Hurdle: Data Archiving

Well, here I am, literally one day into my work on my thesis and I’ve hit my first hurdle: The data.

On the positive side of the equation, I don’t have to jump through the hoops of ethics clearance to get access to my data: It’s all been collected and is sitting in a locker waiting for me to use it.

The negative side comes in two parts, the short version and the long version. The short version: Some of it is unreadable.

The long version I’ll leave you to figure out yourselves from this photo I took (I’ll replace it with a scan to better illustrate the problem when I have a scan):

As you can (probably) see, the page is a photocopy of a page of written text – which in itself isn’t great but it’s not the end of the world – what is definitely a problem is the fact that there should be a good deal more text on that page than is actually visible. Back behind the blurry smeared faded areas used to be what I can only assume was legible text, and therefore some of the original data for a language which is very quickly falling out of use is also fading from its written records.

This isn’t (by any means) the condition of the vast majority of the data I have at my disposal – only the earliest data is kept in solely written form, the following data in much better condition and easily decipherable in the form available to me. All the original materials are kept at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), who keep a fairly comprehensive archive of language and other cultural material to save it for later use. I must admit that, given the state of the photocopies taken a number of years ago, I seriously doubt the legibility of the original documents also which have had several more years to deteriorate. For me, this is a hurdle which will relatively easily be overcome – since I’m working on an honours thesis, I can exclude a large amount of the data which is illegible because I need to exclude a lot of data in any case.

The broader issue raised, I think, is about how data is stored, archived, and duplicated. All of the data I’ll be using for my honours thesis is in paper-form, with very little available in the way of digital records on the language. This is a relic of the time in which most of the data was collected, and for that reason isn’t something that could be easily helped.

Given that these records are some of the few true records of a moribund language remaining, however, it seems that preserving such records from loss purely because of the deterioration of the original written records would be a tragedy for anybody wanting to look at the language in any additonal detail and for the Yanyuwa people who may want to work with their language in the future.

I’m not at all saying that anybody has been negligent or lazy or anything else regarding this language data – for all I know, the original transcript pages are kept digitally as images in much better shape than I have access to them in – it’s more a general observation about what could happen and the value that should be placed on these vitally important cultural records before it’s too late.

Book Review: Nicholas Evans – Dying Words

A bit of a departure from my normal blog format for a book review here, but since I’m in on this one early I thought I’d give it a shot. (That and a few people on Twitter wanted to know what I thought when I was done!)

Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us is a book about the supremely human creation of language, in all its forms and intricacies. It isn’t a book that stands back and proclaims the imminent death of languages, but rather looks down into the crevices of language and what it means to us, to societies, and to communities whose languages are hanging by a rapidly fraying thread. It also serves to describe (although only scratch the surface of) the diversity of thought, meaning and culture embedded within languages not as a eulogy to something passing but as a living, breathing entity.

A word about the author: Dying Words is written by Nicholas Evans, one of the preeminent linguists in Australian linguistics, and perhaps one of the most established living researchers of Australian languages and a great spokesperson for the cause of language endangerment around the globe. He also happens to be the head of the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University. His commitment and sincere interest in the plight of endangered languages is perhaps seen most obviously in the cover of the book, Sweers Island 2008 by the Bentnick Island Artists – painted in 2008 by collectively by every remaining speaker of the Kayardild language, a language and community with which he has worked for well over 20 years, and whose population is now below 10.

The book is broken into five main thematic sections, each broken further into chapters:

The Library of Babel which draws on the image of a language library to describe numerically the diversity of languages of the world, and how the world has changed in the last several hundred years both in aid of and to the determent of language diversity.

A Great Feast of Languages looks at the ways in which languages differ – sounds, grammar and meaning, then looking at the social level of language; kinship, social relations and “[how] speakers keep track of their social universe” (47)

Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History looks, as it suggests, looks into the history of language and what ancient languages have to tell us about language today, and describes some of the techniques employed by linguists in reconstructing long silent languages.

Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture and Thought an amazing section on the relationship of language and thought, boiling one of the most complex ideas in linguistics down to a fascinating and enlightening look at “Trellises of the Mind” and a revealing look at the way art, language and the mind intersect.

Listening While We Can the final section of the book looks at what can and is being done to protect and revive endangered languages as well as looking at some of the complexities of field research of endangered languages.

Dying Words is a linguistics book for everyone, accessible yet deep, informative, and most of all is a good read. It sets out the variety and amazing insights on offer from the world’s endangered languages in a way which teaches you a lot about the languages, their speakers, and why the need to save such languages is becoming more pressing with each passing day – and you probably won’t notice, but you’ll be learning quite a lot of linguistic theory along the way!

Evans can take you away in the most complex linguistic theorem, and bring you back feeling like you went on a journey that wasn’t difficult as much as it was enchanting, and it’s through these encounters that the most interesting insights from languages around the world are found in this book. There is the expectation that you at least have some basic understanding of the workings of language – know what a noun, verb, or adjective is for example – but beyond that everything is spelled out pretty clearly. His experience with a critically endangered Australian language – Kayardild – shines through and his insights into the social and linguistic workings of the society lend great insight into his observations not only about the Kayardild people but of the plight of those experiencing language loss around the world.

This book is about the full gamut of what we lose when languages die, about why it matters, and about what questions and techniques best shape our response to this looming collapse of human ways of knowing…[B]ecause we can only meet this challenge through a concerted effort by linguists, the communities themselves, and the lay public, I have tried to writ this book in a way that speaks to all these types of reader.
Dying Words: xviii-xix.

Dying Words is not intended to be a linguistic reference manual, nor is it intended to be a guide to language endangerment (of which there are already many.) It is a book which is first and foremost a book to be read, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It is a reference book with a thread of story weaved through, bringing with it a sense of the enormity of language and what it means to mankind. If you have an interest in language, or are curious about what’s out there outside the languages you’re familiar with, I strongly recommend this book.

The book is published by Wiley and available now through them and a number of online bookstores such as Amazon.

Twitter: The decline of hashtags

What do you love about Twitter? Is it conversations? The stream of consciousness flying past at a million miles a minute? The ridiculously fast reporting of global events? The amazing resources of all your followers at your fingertips all the time?

There’s a lot to love about Twitter, and most of those good things are beyond the simple 140 characters, and all about community. Hashtags are one of those very community things about Twitter which grew out of nowhere to become one of the most useful things in the arsenal of a Twitter user in categorizing and sorting through the vast amounts of information on Twitter.

Combined with Twitter Search, hashtags create impromptu groups of people who aren’t necessarily following each other, and lets them keep track of events, happenings, topics and ideas without requiring Twitter to build a more complex and less flexible system of groups for tweets. The problem is, they’re beginning to show signs of becoming less useful than they have been, and very quickly indeed.

Perhaps the most successful hashtag phenomena in Twitter is #followfriday – the weekly ritual of nominating people you think other people reading your tweets should follow. The concept only began in January (without the hashtag) and since then it’s become one of the big viral hits of Twitter – all Friday, every Friday since late January, many tweeps have been tweeting their #followfriday recommendations. #followfriday is probably the most relevant canary to demonstrate the problem that hashtags have. There has been a marked decline in #followfriday recommendations, at least in my stream, for the past few Fridays. People are starting to get angry at the constant stream of username lists flying past, drowning out their own tweets, and for the same reason aren’t posting their own recommendations.

Another problem with hashtags, and probably more relevant than #followfriday, is the emerging hashtag memes. Hashtags themselves, for a time, became a meme, but they were mostly nonce creations (eg. #thereallylonghashtagsthatareentertaininginthemselves). What’s started happening, though, is that hashtags are starting to take over the Twitterstream all the time. A few examples from the last week are:  #3wordsbeforesex #3wordsduringsex #3wordsaftersex (noticing a pattern?) and as I write this, 6 of the 10 trends on Twitter are hashtag memes: #liesboystell #liesgirlstell #3wordsaftersex #twistory #thingsmummysaid #3breakupwords.

Now I’ve got nothing against memes, but I don’t think memes are what hashtags are all about. Maybe we need a new standard – %3breakupwords, then have a separate trending list on Twitter search, maybe? In any case, there is an increasing amount of noise in Twitter trends, and they go back to hashtags, and that’s a problem. It undermines, at a fundamental level, one of the important ways for Twitter to show what it’s thinking.

Of course, this is only part of the problem, and something else which has become a problem in recent days and weeks is the growing noise from bots trawling the trends list and spamming the stream with their products, ads and smutty rubbish. I don’t purport to have an easy solution to that though, other than tightening up the sign-up page of Twitter to stop these annoying bots signing up en mass.

Do you have an opinion on the future of hashtags? Tell me what you think in the comments!

Future Summit 2009 & Twitter

Well, here I am, just 3 days after Future Summit 2009 ended in Melbourne. Only now have I got around the posting a blog post about it, but better late than never I say.

So I’m not going to talk about the discussions or outcomes of the Future Summit, but rather focus on its use of Twitter as a broadcast and interaction medium and what I took from this. I’ll start by saying one very important thing: I wasn’t there. I was relying almost completely on the Twitter feed provided by a number of very dedicated and clued on Twitter personalities who did a great job.

The idea behind the Future Summit feed was (from what I’ve read) about trying to remove existing media hierarchies. This meant bypassing newspapers – too slow & bureaucratic; blogs – also too slow; television – not interactive. This left Twitter, the microblogging service taking the world by storm at the moment. What it also left us with was a 140 character limit.

As great a job as the Twitter correspondents were doing during the two day summit, though, I still don’t feel that I have a really well developed sense of what was said there. 140 characters, it must be said, doesn’t replace a full video feed. It also doesn’t replace blogs. It is, primarily, an interaction medium. There have been many events – really serious events – which have been covered by Twitter in very meaningful and constructive ways. I think in the vast majority of these cases, Twitter has been used as an interaction medium rather than a broadcast medium.

I think the tweet above demonstrates what I’m trying to say here – there’s a very broad brushstroke idea of what is being said, but it leaves more questions than it does answers. More often than not, the nuances of argument which were no doubt taking place at the Future Summit were lost in translation to 140 characters, and although it’s been noted that approximately half the questions asked of presenters at the summit came directly from Twitter, I suspect many of them digressed somewhat from the issue at hand due only to the fact that most people reading the Twitter stream would have had no idea what was actually being argued.

The best interaction I’ve seen with broadcasting, Twitter, and interaction is the interaction between tweeters during television shows (Stephen Conroy appearing on QandA a but over a month ago comes to mind). I think that with this in mind, the inclusion of a video stream of the Future Summit combined with the already established Twitter correspondents would be a great way to get people involved and interested in what’s happening. Rather than focusing on simply reporting the events of the summit, the Twitter contingent could then focus on being the mediators between the world of Twitter and the conference without needing to summarise very complex ideas into 140 characters for mass consumption.

That said, @futuresummit being reserved for some kind of coverage as was already present would also be good.

Overall, I get where the organizers of the Future Summit were coming from with this idea, and it is a good idea. I think the best (albiet old) idea here is that we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater – lets not throw out old media completely in place of new media, because new media in many ways has grown out of traditional media forms such as television and video, and doesn’t quite work 100% without it.

UPDATED: TwitDoc – First Impressions

UPDATE: The creators of TwitDoc (surprisingly, I must say, given the readership of this blog!) took the time to read my little review and respond to most of the problems I’ve raised here. From the outset I’d like to thank them for listening to my ramblings about the site, it’s always good to see people taking on board criticism and working on it (ahem, #fixreplies, Twitter.)

The header images have been fixed (on the main page – the actual document view has been overlooked so far, but I’m guessing that’s an accident, so a heads up here ) and the menu is much easier to see. The Flash form is still there, but I’ve been told that it too might be on its way out, or at least a viable HTML alternative will be added. These are all good changes, and thank you TwitDoc for implementing them!

I uploaded a document to the service, and it is a great service. Another example of the power of Twitter apps, and the fact that 140 characters can really be stretched to contain a lot – a whole document, book or presentation in this case.

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On the advice of @geehall1 (via his blog) , I decided to check out a new third-party Twitter service, TwitDoc.

Basically it’s a service that allows you to upload documents of various formats and share them on Twitter. In theory. But I haven’t used it yet. I didn’t get far enough without feeling compelled to write a blog post about my first impressions. So here’s a list for your viewing pleasure: Continue reading…