Books of the future ... are here

This is just the beginning, I think, of what "books" can do with new technologies:

Research tools

I recommend starting your research with Google Scholar. Be sure to change your scholar preferences, and add the WSU library system, to get direct access to pdfs of the articles.

Google Scholar also allows importing citations directly into a bibliographic manager, such as EndNote, which is what I use.

A great open source option for that is Zotero, but Zotero imports citations directly in the browser, as opposed to through Google Scholar.

My research site on mobile is: mobilestorytelling.net

Hope that helps!

Super Bowl commercials worth examining

Groupon



Budweiser "Wild West"



Best Buy "Buy Back"



Chevy "Facebook car"



NFL fans



Chrysler

Merry / Happy Groundhog Day!

"No shadow, spring is near!"

Oh, wait, Punxsutawney Phil only has been right 39 percent of the time in his predictions, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Well, at least all of this fuss isn't about a marmot.

Oh, wait, Alaska ...

The recently announced words of the year

There are other groups that do this, too, but here is a sampling:

From the American Dialect Society: App

From the press release:

"App has been around for ages, but with millions of dollars of marketing muscle
behind the slogan ‘There’s an app for that,’ plus the arrival of ‘app stores’ for a wide
spectrum of operating systems for phones and computers, app really exploded in the last 12
months,” (Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the
American Dialect Society and executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com) said. “One of the most convincing arguments from the voting floor was from a woman who said that even her grandmother had heard of it.”
Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just
words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be
newly prominent or notable in the past year, in the manner of Time magazine’s Person of
the Year.

From the Global Language Monitor: Spillcam

"The BP Spillcam instantly beamed the immensity of the Gulf Spill around the world to the dismay of environmentalists, BP’s PR staff and the President."

From Urban Dictionary: Gate Rape

"The TSA airport screening procedure.
My sister got gate raped at LAX."

The history of Social Media in infographic form

Courtesy of OnlineSchools.org:

Rethinking education by Michael Wesch

New video by the the Kansas State professor, from our earlier discussions, raises provocative questions about technology and higher education:

Message in bottle story

Courtesy of the Associated Press

Here is a link to one of the many versions of this story spread throughout the country via the Associated Press.

See if you can decode it yourself, via the Caesar cipher.

David Sedaris' piece on language across cultures

This commentary, "Six to Eight Black Men," was written originally for Esquire magazine. Here is what is billed as David Sedaris' old MySpace page and an audio version, with Sedaris reading the work.

Language / translation resources

There is a list of helpful web sites on this class blog, in the right-hand column. But here are two more key sources of information about languages that might be helpful:

Ethnologue - encyclopedic source on the 6,909 languages of the world

Foundation for Endangered Languages manifesto -- an FAQ about languages in the world today

Memory exercises

Alyssa Blanton

Jake Burton

Lindsey Esch

Todd Hartsfield

Erin Kelley

Mary Chunyan Liu

Josh Lovejoy

Anaya Martella

Heather Martin

Chad McClure

Sandi Oja

Alan Olson

Dom Ramunno-Johnson

Josh Roberts

Sarah Robison-Mathes

Zak Steltz

Laura Velarde

Cassie Watson

Jennifer Wheeler

Visions of Students Today -- Our turn

Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is putting together a sequel to the Visions of Students Today video we watched on Jan. 12. Here is his call for submissions. This would make a great extra credit project for anyone interested. If you want to give it a try, let me know.

A light look at McLuhan

Through stop-action animation:

The Ballad of Marshall Mcluhan from Randall Acronym on Vimeo.

Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent

Recently ran across this documentary, which has a lot of fascinating insights into language.

Blood libel? ...

Listen carefully to the language use in this response to the recent Arizona assassinations:

Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

And compare to this:



And this:



And this piece on the history of the phrase "blood libel" from Salon.com

And this editorial from the Washington Times, which adds "pogrom" to the mix.

Emergency closure information at WSU Vancouver

Concerned about weather issues this semester? Will class meet? Check here

Check word frequencies throughout history

Via Google Ngrams

A vision of students today

Video by Kansas State University prof Michael Wesch:

A helpful word to know for this class is:

duwxi

I will explain in class on Jan. 12.

See you soon,

- Prof Brett

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