
English: 
LAUREN: Since we have a natural lull in the room, I might make best use of that and start today's workshop. Thank you all so much for coming to
Talking the Talkey, which is an opportunity to reflect on how, as linguists,
we can engage various groups of people in information about linguistics that they may otherwise not really engage with.
I think it's worth thinking about the role of the expert in today's cultural
climate, and what we can do to better faciliate thoughtful evidenced-based conversations about language, and how it works and how people use it.
For today, we have our panel of speakers up the front here. Everyone will be speaking for

English: 
LAUREN: Since we have a natural lull in the room, I might make best use of that and start today's workshop. Thank you all so much for coming to
Talking the Talkey, which is an opportunity to reflect on how, as linguists,
we can engage various groups of people in information about linguistics that they may otherwise not really engage with.
I think it's worth thinking about the role of the expert in today's cultural
climate, and what we can do to better faciliate thoughtful evidenced-based conversations about language, and how it works and how people use it.
For today, we have our panel of speakers up the front here. Everyone will be speaking for

English: 
about 10 minutes, I'll do a very kind of informal just some discrete coughing behind you if you go too long, because hopefully
we'll move though you'll get to see some of the things that people are doing in terms of linguistic communication and then
we'll have at least hopefully half an hour for discussion that can then just move into further discussion on the way
to the opening plenary talk for the conference. I will kind of get things started. There is a hashtag
and a set of slides. You can pull up the slides if you want now, or take them home and look at them later.
If you're on your phone during this - it's like the opposite of a class or a lecture - please get your phone out. Please
tweet, please facebook and kind of continue the conversation
on there. Our first speaker today is Daniel Midgley who has come from UWA and will be talking about Talk the Talk.
DANIEL: The first thing that I want to say is I feel

English: 
about 10 minutes, I'll do a very kind of informal just some discrete coughing behind you if you go too long, because hopefully
we'll move though you'll get to see some of the things that people are doing in terms of linguistic communication and then
we'll have at least hopefully half an hour for discussion that can then just move into further discussion on the way
to the opening plenary talk for the conference. I will kind of get things started. There is a hashtag
and a set of slides. You can pull up the slides if you want now, or take them home and look at them later.
If you're on your phone during this - it's like the opposite of a class or a lecture - please get your phone out. Please
tweet, please facebook and kind of continue the conversation
on there. Our first speaker today is Daniel Midgley who has come from UWA and will be talking about Talk the Talk.
DANIEL: The first thing that I want to say is I feel

English: 
like we're lucky to be alive in this age because public linguistics is something that is really exciting right now.
It's a very hot topic, people are really interested in it
and so we're lucky to help occupy the space that we do, but also I want to share some ideas that you can have if you're
not a public linguistic person, but you would like to do more of it, some ideas where you can use the skills
you already have to do more outreach
and stuff. Here's a little bit about me: my name's Daniel Midgley. I do a show called Talk the Talk on RTRFM 92.1
in Perth, Australia. It's a small community radio station, youth-oriented.
It's really really great to be able to work there, to be able to do that because on Tuesdays I come in and play the show with my friends
Ben and Kylie
and then take some questions via email, be able to answer them at the end of the show. The interesting thing about having a podcast that's

English: 
like we're lucky to be alive in this age because public linguistics is something that is really exciting right now.
It's a very hot topic, people are really interested in it
and so we're lucky to help occupy the space that we do, but also I want to share some ideas that you can have if you're
not a public linguistic person, but you would like to do more of it, some ideas where you can use the skills
you already have to do more outreach
and stuff. Here's a little bit about me: my name's Daniel Midgley. I do a show called Talk the Talk on RTRFM 92.1
in Perth, Australia. It's a small community radio station, youth-oriented.
It's really really great to be able to work there, to be able to do that because on Tuesdays I come in and play the show with my friends
Ben and Kylie
and then take some questions via email, be able to answer them at the end of the show. The interesting thing about having a podcast that's

English: 
strapped to a radio show is that you already have kind of a built-in audience, so that's very nice. And in fact there is a bit of recognition
that's happening this year which in previous years hasn't been so. So I play the show and then I podcast, it so you have a best of both worlds.
I also do something called Because Language which is just a podcast,
not a radio show; it's all long form interviews. And then I'm also very fortuate this year to be able to do on ABC
Radio Perth something called the Speakeasy, just come in, do a segment
you know, take some talkback questions. Which is, actually very challenging, and the audience for the youth-oriented station RTR
is very different from the ABC which is a lot older, a lot more conservative and
I fight people more, so that's interesting. They're just — they're hungry for validation, they're terrible at grammar.
I'm serious, you wouldn't believe it. People are fascinated by language because of course language is very interesting.
I've never seen this much interest in public linguistics. However a lot of people are interested in stupid things that are boring.

English: 
strapped to a radio show is that you already have kind of a built-in audience, so that's very nice. And in fact there is a bit of recognition
that's happening this year which in previous years hasn't been so. So I play the show and then I podcast, it so you have a best of both worlds.
I also do something called Because Language which is just a podcast,
not a radio show; it's all long form interviews. And then I'm also very fortuate this year to be able to do on ABC
Radio Perth something called the Speakeasy, just come in, do a segment
you know, take some talkback questions. Which is, actually very challenging, and the audience for the youth-oriented station RTR
is very different from the ABC which is a lot older, a lot more conservative and
I fight people more, so that's interesting. They're just — they're hungry for validation, they're terrible at grammar.
I'm serious, you wouldn't believe it. People are fascinated by language because of course language is very interesting.
I've never seen this much interest in public linguistics. However a lot of people are interested in stupid things that are boring.

English: 
Like how many languages you speak? Seriously was a question the first week I was on.
What do you think about two spaces versus one at the end of a sentence when you type?
And a lot things that aren't... you guys, there are interesting questions...
but they're not the most interesting thing about linguistics... I can show you the world... there's so much more out there, let's do this.
And also, on the ABC I have to tamp down a lot more language policing than I do, so there's that.
The flip side of this is that people are terrified by language. One thing that people say is, 'Are you Daniel on that show about
language?' I'm like 'yeah' and they're like 'oh man I love your show! Oh, and now I feel
insecure about talking to you'. There's a lot of linguistic insecurity out there, people feeling bad about the way that they talk
and so there's there's a lot of affirmation that I can do. I think people have bad memories of language and grammar instruction when it was done poorly.
and there's a lot of linguistic insecurity.

English: 
Like how many languages you speak? Seriously was a question the first week I was on.
What do you think about two spaces versus one at the end of a sentence when you type?
And a lot things that aren't... you guys, there are interesting questions...
but they're not the most interesting thing about linguistics... I can show you the world... there's so much more out there, let's do this.
And also, on the ABC I have to tamp down a lot more language policing than I do, so there's that.
The flip side of this is that people are terrified by language. One thing that people say is, 'Are you Daniel on that show about
language?' I'm like 'yeah' and they're like 'oh man I love your show! Oh, and now I feel
insecure about talking to you'. There's a lot of linguistic insecurity out there, people feeling bad about the way that they talk
and so there's there's a lot of affirmation that I can do. I think people have bad memories of language and grammar instruction when it was done poorly.
and there's a lot of linguistic insecurity.

English: 
Let's talk about what happens when the media goes wrong
and there are many points at which this can fail. The first point in the chain that I want to talk about is researchers
or lecturers. We are good or we do but we are very busy. We're encouraged to do outreach.
"Encouraged." Not in any tangible way, it's just that they like it when we do it.
Right, is there anybody who's heard this before? 'We want you to do more outreach.' Sure. Have you got any support in outreach?
Silence. OK. And we don't always connect with the public.
In fact, I have, in preparing for this I got to speak to a lecturer who said 'Yeah, I did some talkback radio and it was just the worst
experience I've ever had' because if you're inexperienced it can be very daunting and intimidating and it can not be maybe a good experience.
So that's one point. Also second actor: uni P.R.
Offices. Tthey're there to promote us, they're there to promote our work,

English: 
Let's talk about what happens when the media goes wrong
and there are many points at which this can fail. The first point in the chain that I want to talk about is researchers
or lecturers. We are good or we do but we are very busy. We're encouraged to do outreach.
"Encouraged." Not in any tangible way, it's just that they like it when we do it.
Right, is there anybody who's heard this before? 'We want you to do more outreach.' Sure. Have you got any support in outreach?
Silence. OK. And we don't always connect with the public.
In fact, I have, in preparing for this I got to speak to a lecturer who said 'Yeah, I did some talkback radio and it was just the worst
experience I've ever had' because if you're inexperienced it can be very daunting and intimidating and it can not be maybe a good experience.
So that's one point. Also second actor: uni P.R.
Offices. Tthey're there to promote us, they're there to promote our work,

English: 
but they also like to be very sexy, so they also don't know very much about what we do.
Especially in linguistics, where everybody thinks they know linguistics because everybody speaks a language, right? They think they know what we do,
but they don't. OK, the next point.
Journalists. They are smart people, very often.
But they don't always know who's worth listening to, which is why we get, you know, every once in a while this 'drunk Aussie
accent' story. Right? Who noticed that one? OK. And then it comes up every every couple of years, and we keep having to beat it back.
And then there's the public. Also smart people, but they don't do linguistics all day, at least that's how I like to envision them.
And then there's also the ones of the public who are full of attitudes, they are trollish and opinionated, and they sometimes cause
a bit of trouble when you're doing talkback and have to handle them diplomatically.
Something can go wrong at every stage in this chain, and this is what I call the Scylla and Charybdis of sexy science.

English: 
but they also like to be very sexy, so they also don't know very much about what we do.
Especially in linguistics, where everybody thinks they know linguistics because everybody speaks a language, right? They think they know what we do,
but they don't. OK, the next point.
Journalists. They are smart people, very often.
But they don't always know who's worth listening to, which is why we get, you know, every once in a while this 'drunk Aussie
accent' story. Right? Who noticed that one? OK. And then it comes up every every couple of years, and we keep having to beat it back.
And then there's the public. Also smart people, but they don't do linguistics all day, at least that's how I like to envision them.
And then there's also the ones of the public who are full of attitudes, they are trollish and opinionated, and they sometimes cause
a bit of trouble when you're doing talkback and have to handle them diplomatically.
Something can go wrong at every stage in this chain, and this is what I call the Scylla and Charybdis of sexy science.

English: 
If it's not sexy enough, then nobody will listen to it, but if it's way too sexy, then that means it's usually wrong and there are faults.
in the conclusions being drawn. So you're always sort of constantly sex-ing it up
and beating it back and trying to stay right in the middle there. Let me take a look at one time
when something went wrong. This was a paper by Damián Blasi, Morten Christiansen and team, it's called Sound Meaning
Association Bias as Evidenced Across Thousands of Languages. You might remember the story. This was the one where they
looked at data from loads of languages
and they found that there were, you know, as opposed to language being totally arbitrary, they found there were certain
regularities that kept coming up. Words for round things across languages seemed to have a rhotic in them, an R. Words for nose
always seemed to have a nasal. What a surprise, right? I mean it's a nose. What do you think is going to come out of that thing?
But in the abstract of the paper it says this, 'These striking similarities call for a re-examination of the fundamental
assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign'.

English: 
If it's not sexy enough, then nobody will listen to it, but if it's way too sexy, then that means it's usually wrong and there are faults.
in the conclusions being drawn. So you're always sort of constantly sex-ing it up
and beating it back and trying to stay right in the middle there. Let me take a look at one time
when something went wrong. This was a paper by Damián Blasi, Morten Christiansen and team, it's called Sound Meaning
Association Bias as Evidenced Across Thousands of Languages. You might remember the story. This was the one where they
looked at data from loads of languages
and they found that there were, you know, as opposed to language being totally arbitrary, they found there were certain
regularities that kept coming up. Words for round things across languages seemed to have a rhotic in them, an R. Words for nose
always seemed to have a nasal. What a surprise, right? I mean it's a nose. What do you think is going to come out of that thing?
But in the abstract of the paper it says this, 'These striking similarities call for a re-examination of the fundamental
assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign'.

English: 
Now I don't know what is in your lecture lides, but in my introductory lecture slides I do have a bit on arbitrariness,
but also have a thing where I say 'hey, here's some things where maybe it's not so arbitrary and let's talk about those for a while.'
so this isn't exactly unknown. Right? But there is it is. By the time it got to the P.R.
Department of the university it said 'In a study of that shatters a cornerstone concept in linguistics,
an analysis of nearly two thirds of the world's languages shows humans tend to use the same sounds for common
objects and ideas no matter what language they are speaking.'
OK, so getting less helpful. By the time it got to the media it looked like this. 'Humans may speak a universal language.' OK.
And I actually got to do an interview with Damián Blasi on Talk the Talk earlier this year.
and the sense that I got was that they were sort of watching in horror as this whole thing spiraled out of control

English: 
Now I don't know what is in your lecture lides, but in my introductory lecture slides I do have a bit on arbitrariness,
but also have a thing where I say 'hey, here's some things where maybe it's not so arbitrary and let's talk about those for a while.'
so this isn't exactly unknown. Right? But there is it is. By the time it got to the P.R.
Department of the university it said 'In a study of that shatters a cornerstone concept in linguistics,
an analysis of nearly two thirds of the world's languages shows humans tend to use the same sounds for common
objects and ideas no matter what language they are speaking.'
OK, so getting less helpful. By the time it got to the media it looked like this. 'Humans may speak a universal language.' OK.
And I actually got to do an interview with Damián Blasi on Talk the Talk earlier this year.
and the sense that I got was that they were sort of watching in horror as this whole thing spiraled out of control

English: 
because once again journalists are smart people but they don't know we do we do, and everybody thinks they know language, but they might not.
Secretly, I think that the original abstract wasn't helpful. OK, enough of that, though. That's a case where things go wrong. So what
do we do, and what maybe can you do? There are some things that you can do if you're somebody who isn't doing a lot of
outreach but would like to do more.
And some of these you're probably already doing. Be a good Language Explainer. What does that mean? It means you kind of have to think about how things
look to other people, but that's one thing that smart people are good at doing, it just takes a little bit of practice
Being available to media. There are lists you can get on. You might get phone calls
every once in a while. 'Hey, you know, we have a news hole we want to fill, you know, we just need you. We don't need you to be right
or anything, we just need you to be interesting and fill up the appropriate time, right, so could you do that?' They really do need stories
and you can manage to be successful at this, and you find you like it, it's something you can do. If it's something you don't like, you
have a bad experience, maybe it's something you might want to shy away from, or maybe you might want to get better at it.

English: 
because once again journalists are smart people but they don't know we do we do, and everybody thinks they know language, but they might not.
Secretly, I think that the original abstract wasn't helpful. OK, enough of that, though. That's a case where things go wrong. So what
do we do, and what maybe can you do? There are some things that you can do if you're somebody who isn't doing a lot of
outreach but would like to do more.
And some of these you're probably already doing. Be a good Language Explainer. What does that mean? It means you kind of have to think about how things
look to other people, but that's one thing that smart people are good at doing, it just takes a little bit of practice
Being available to media. There are lists you can get on. You might get phone calls
every once in a while. 'Hey, you know, we have a news hole we want to fill, you know, we just need you. We don't need you to be right
or anything, we just need you to be interesting and fill up the appropriate time, right, so could you do that?' They really do need stories
and you can manage to be successful at this, and you find you like it, it's something you can do. If it's something you don't like, you
have a bad experience, maybe it's something you might want to shy away from, or maybe you might want to get better at it.

English: 
I wish that everyone, when they published a paper, would publish a public version, a version that's intended for the public.
And along with the regular one. So you know, what does this mean for you? What does it mean if words across different languages have the same sounds?
What does it mean that creoles are different? How can you use this in your life?
Now I have said that people think they know language but they kind of don't - I want to show the flip side of this too,
and that is that people think they don't know about language but actually they know a lot about language
and I haven't found a better way of approaching it than this: this was a tweet that just came out of nowhere.
It's from a book, I forget who who wrote this. It says Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion, size, age, shape
color, origin, material, purpouse, noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

English: 
I wish that everyone, when they published a paper, would publish a public version, a version that's intended for the public.
And along with the regular one. So you know, what does this mean for you? What does it mean if words across different languages have the same sounds?
What does it mean that creoles are different? How can you use this in your life?
Now I have said that people think they know language but they kind of don't - I want to show the flip side of this too,
and that is that people think they don't know about language but actually they know a lot about language
and I haven't found a better way of approaching it than this: this was a tweet that just came out of nowhere.
It's from a book, I forget who who wrote this. It says Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion, size, age, shape
color, origin, material, purpouse, noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

English: 
but if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that almost every speaker uses
but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't
exist. So we did a show called Red Big Balloon, where I got my friends Ben and Kylie to sort of put adjectives in what they felt was
the right order, and lo and behold they matched up, right, wow! this is amazing! Look at all this stuff that's in your brain already! How did you know that?
How did it get there? Isn't language amazing?
And this I think is a good way to do it. Because it helps to people to unlock what's already in there.
OK, oh, I gotta stop. We also need to challenge langauge ideologies, and there's a lot of classism and a lot of racism
that's dressed up in concern about language. That needs to stop. So it's not all intuitive.
We need to bring the enthusiasm that we feel for language, we need to remind us what got us in the game in the first place.

English: 
but if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that almost every speaker uses
but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't
exist. So we did a show called Red Big Balloon, where I got my friends Ben and Kylie to sort of put adjectives in what they felt was
the right order, and lo and behold they matched up, right, wow! this is amazing! Look at all this stuff that's in your brain already! How did you know that?
How did it get there? Isn't language amazing?
And this I think is a good way to do it. Because it helps to people to unlock what's already in there.
OK, oh, I gotta stop. We also need to challenge langauge ideologies, and there's a lot of classism and a lot of racism
that's dressed up in concern about language. That needs to stop. So it's not all intuitive.
We need to bring the enthusiasm that we feel for language, we need to remind us what got us in the game in the first place.

English: 
We also need to respect the listeners. We can break it down without dumbing it down. Oh, and that's about it for me. [APPLAUSE]
LAUREN: I'm going to give you that and I'm going to do a very meandering introduction so that Rosey has a chance to just flick the slides over here.
It would be a good chance to take out your phones and tweet.
Put something on Facebook. That's kind of a practical activity for you to participate in today. Katie Jepson and Rosey Billington are here representing the
Linguistics Roadshow and they're going to share some of their experiences.
KATIE: Maybe I'll stay here.
LAUREN: No, got to get in the video camera. DANIEL: Got to be in shot
KATIE: ooh. ROSEY: But then we can't see our slides. BRIGDHE: No, Stand over there, it's fine.
KATIE: We'll stand here. Alright. DANIEL: Alright, I'll scoot over
KATIE: So indeed we're talking about the Linguistics Roadshow today, which is a CoEDL-funded outreach project.

English: 
We also need to respect the listeners. We can break it down without dumbing it down. Oh, and that's about it for me. [APPLAUSE]
LAUREN: I'm going to give you that and I'm going to do a very meandering introduction so that Rosey has a chance to just flick the slides over here.
It would be a good chance to take out your phones and tweet.
Put something on Facebook. That's kind of a practical activity for you to participate in today. Katie Jepson and Rosey Billington are here representing the
Linguistics Roadshow and they're going to share some of their experiences.
KATIE: Maybe I'll stay here.
LAUREN: No, got to get in the video camera. DANIEL: Got to be in shot
KATIE: ooh. ROSEY: But then we can't see our slides. BRIGDHE: No, Stand over there, it's fine.
KATIE: We'll stand here. Alright. DANIEL: Alright, I'll scoot over
KATIE: So indeed we're talking about the Linguistics Roadshow today, which is a CoEDL-funded outreach project.

English: 
We specifically sought funding for outreach in this case, because the opportunity arose, which doesn't always happen.
It's a workshop aimed at high school students, it's about two hours long.
And this is our kind of little one-sentence 'what is it?'
An interactive showcase of the science of language presenting the big questions
and little-known facts about language for a general audience, and by that we do mean year seven to year ten students.
So in creating the Roadshow we had three - how many? - three main motivations.
Our first was to increase the pubic understanding of linguistics
and language use in Australia, trying to take into consideration what people do know and what people don't know

English: 
We specifically sought funding for outreach in this case, because the opportunity arose, which doesn't always happen.
It's a workshop aimed at high school students, it's about two hours long.
And this is our kind of little one-sentence 'what is it?'
An interactive showcase of the science of language presenting the big questions
and little-known facts about language for a general audience, and by that we do mean year seven to year ten students.
So in creating the Roadshow we had three - how many? - three main motivations.
Our first was to increase the pubic understanding of linguistics
and language use in Australia, trying to take into consideration what people do know and what people don't know

English: 
and negative feelings - as we were just saying - about agism or racism, and so on.
We wanted to raise the profile of linguistics, because as linguists we think it's an interesting area of research.
and if you could inspire that in some students, that would make us happy. We wanted to make it in general more discoverable to students who might not
have access, and present the actual linguistic research as something that can be quite interesting and relevant
to their everyday lives even if the pursuit doesn't interest them.
We specifically wanted to target students who are not able to easily get to universities to find out about it themselves.
And so so far we've been on two trips with a third in the words. We've been to part of north western Victoria and to Broome.
ROSEY: So why did we pick students? and specifically the year 7-10?

English: 
and negative feelings - as we were just saying - about agism or racism, and so on.
We wanted to raise the profile of linguistics, because as linguists we think it's an interesting area of research.
and if you could inspire that in some students, that would make us happy. We wanted to make it in general more discoverable to students who might not
have access, and present the actual linguistic research as something that can be quite interesting and relevant
to their everyday lives even if the pursuit doesn't interest them.
We specifically wanted to target students who are not able to easily get to universities to find out about it themselves.
And so so far we've been on two trips with a third in the words. We've been to part of north western Victoria and to Broome.
ROSEY: So why did we pick students? and specifically the year 7-10?

English: 
And one of the things to mention is that we specifically want to target students in their school environment. We didn't want to try
and set up something where they, the schools, had to organise them coming in or anything.
We wanted to go there, do a self-contained thing that the teachers don't have to think
about anything. But why we picked the the students. Well, we thought firstly they might be a bit more accepting of new
or different ideas. You know, other people are kind of
quite fixed in their views on how language works and it can be quite hard to shift that or bring something new to the discussion,
but we thought students are really well placed to do that. They're there learning every day, we can add something into the mix.
And they might be also well placed to share any interesting
or useful information they've learned with other people in their networks, families, friends.
Something really catches their interest this, you know, this can often spread
and go far beyond that individual student.
And we also thought that students might particularly benefit from positive messages about especially variation in language use.
Often in school they're getting a lot of sort of negative feedback, 'you can't spell like that, you can't say that, don't say that, don't do this'
'don't do that' — we wanted to kind of be a little bit of a different force saying 'You know, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on'
'A lot of it's okay, and look at all this amazing variation.' And of course as Katie said,

English: 
And one of the things to mention is that we specifically want to target students in their school environment. We didn't want to try
and set up something where they, the schools, had to organise them coming in or anything.
We wanted to go there, do a self-contained thing that the teachers don't have to think
about anything. But why we picked the the students. Well, we thought firstly they might be a bit more accepting of new
or different ideas. You know, other people are kind of
quite fixed in their views on how language works and it can be quite hard to shift that or bring something new to the discussion,
but we thought students are really well placed to do that. They're there learning every day, we can add something into the mix.
And they might be also well placed to share any interesting
or useful information they've learned with other people in their networks, families, friends.
Something really catches their interest this, you know, this can often spread
and go far beyond that individual student.
And we also thought that students might particularly benefit from positive messages about especially variation in language use.
Often in school they're getting a lot of sort of negative feedback, 'you can't spell like that, you can't say that, don't say that, don't do this'
'don't do that' — we wanted to kind of be a little bit of a different force saying 'You know, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on'
'A lot of it's okay, and look at all this amazing variation.' And of course as Katie said,

English: 
we hope that perhaps we might also spark an interest in persuing linguistics or a language-related career, but that was very much a sort of secondary goal.
It's just more like 'what can we offer them that's interesting, useful, relevant.' And then we also had the secondary audience which were the teachers.
And we sort of left it up to the teachers how much they may
or may not want to get involved. As we said, we wanted to be just a self-contained thing where we just land in the school,
do our thing for two hours and then leave.
They don't have to stress about anything. But we figured that they'd probably at least be listening in, maybe getting involved to some extent,
and that the workshop content
and perhaps the style might then indirectly inform their views, not just on what linguistics is, but what linguists do, and who they are,
and, you know, how they might interact.
We also wanted to keep it in mind that we really needed to show the educational value of the workshop,
because linguistics doesn't already have a strong presence in the curriculum in Australian schools, so we wanted to show, look,
there are various ways this connects with stuff you are already doing in the classroom, stuff the kids are already doing,

English: 
we hope that perhaps we might also spark an interest in persuing linguistics or a language-related career, but that was very much a sort of secondary goal.
It's just more like 'what can we offer them that's interesting, useful, relevant.' And then we also had the secondary audience which were the teachers.
And we sort of left it up to the teachers how much they may
or may not want to get involved. As we said, we wanted to be just a self-contained thing where we just land in the school,
do our thing for two hours and then leave.
They don't have to stress about anything. But we figured that they'd probably at least be listening in, maybe getting involved to some extent,
and that the workshop content
and perhaps the style might then indirectly inform their views, not just on what linguistics is, but what linguists do, and who they are,
and, you know, how they might interact.
We also wanted to keep it in mind that we really needed to show the educational value of the workshop,
because linguistics doesn't already have a strong presence in the curriculum in Australian schools, so we wanted to show, look,
there are various ways this connects with stuff you are already doing in the classroom, stuff the kids are already doing,

English: 
so that maybe they'll invite us back, or maybe they'll feel more positive about welcoming others into the school with linguistics.
And of course teachers might also be in a position to reinforce things that come up in the workshops
and distribute further information. We had booklets and online material and all sorts of things they might be able to draw on.
KATIE: So we had a few key messages that we wanted to get across because we couldn't run a whole degree's worth of
information in a two-hour session. We decided that if there was one thing that the students got from the workshop it's that
there's so much diversity at all these different levels and it's all really great.
And we kind of broke that down into three key messages. The first one that there is a huge amount of linguistic diversity
at the global level.
Pretty simple, you can get that with some wizzbang numbers, cool maps.
The second is to kind of dive into the Australian linguistic landscape, of course, talk about

English: 
so that maybe they'll invite us back, or maybe they'll feel more positive about welcoming others into the school with linguistics.
And of course teachers might also be in a position to reinforce things that come up in the workshops
and distribute further information. We had booklets and online material and all sorts of things they might be able to draw on.
KATIE: So we had a few key messages that we wanted to get across because we couldn't run a whole degree's worth of
information in a two-hour session. We decided that if there was one thing that the students got from the workshop it's that
there's so much diversity at all these different levels and it's all really great.
And we kind of broke that down into three key messages. The first one that there is a huge amount of linguistic diversity
at the global level.
Pretty simple, you can get that with some wizzbang numbers, cool maps.
The second is to kind of dive into the Australian linguistic landscape, of course, talk about

English: 
Indigenous traditional languages and creoles and migrant languages, of course including English.
And variation within Australian English, which of course the students would be able to reflect
on their own language, their own Australian English in this way. And it's at this point
when we were also able to highlight what we as linguists might do and actually use data
and say 'if you're interested, if you have a question, you can usually figure it out, by looking at data, there are ways you can answer your question'
ROSEY: So that's sort of what guided the develop of the content, um, which is fine you know, okay, that's all the stuff we want to include.
How are we going to deliver that to the students? is it just going to be a wall of information for two hours,
or how can we do that most effectively? So we spent a really long time planning this stuff before
we actually implemented it. So we sort of thought really carefully about this. One is that we thought it would be more interesting of course

English: 
Indigenous traditional languages and creoles and migrant languages, of course including English.
And variation within Australian English, which of course the students would be able to reflect
on their own language, their own Australian English in this way. And it's at this point
when we were also able to highlight what we as linguists might do and actually use data
and say 'if you're interested, if you have a question, you can usually figure it out, by looking at data, there are ways you can answer your question'
ROSEY: So that's sort of what guided the develop of the content, um, which is fine you know, okay, that's all the stuff we want to include.
How are we going to deliver that to the students? is it just going to be a wall of information for two hours,
or how can we do that most effectively? So we spent a really long time planning this stuff before
we actually implemented it. So we sort of thought really carefully about this. One is that we thought it would be more interesting of course

English: 
for our audience if we had a really dynamic delivery, high energy, not too much technical terminology, in fact there's pretty much
none in the whole workshop.
Not too long, so two hours was a really good time frame. Not taking ourselves too seriously, as this photo shows.
The workshop session is broken into sort of a twenty-minute talk, and then three series of activities, and then a little bit more
talking at the end, and we have 4 presenters doing that talk together. Kind of (snap snap) a minute
and a half at a time, switching in and out and really keeping it very lively, and very lighthearted.
And we also wanted to, as much as possible, relate all of the content in the workshop to students' everyday experience
with language because they are experts, as Daniel also said, in many ways. People have a lot of knowledge already. They sometimes just
don't realise they have that knowledge.
And it's also really nice for the students to realise that it in many ways they're experts on stuff that their teachers have no idea about.
You know, certain conventions of how you might use punctuation in text messaging, or something like that. They're really switched on about a whole lot of stuff
and they have a lot to offer in a discussion.
We also wanted to pick topics that would generate a lot of discussion and invite different opinions and insights. So some of you
have probably seen the maps, the mapping activity

English: 
for our audience if we had a really dynamic delivery, high energy, not too much technical terminology, in fact there's pretty much
none in the whole workshop.
Not too long, so two hours was a really good time frame. Not taking ourselves too seriously, as this photo shows.
The workshop session is broken into sort of a twenty-minute talk, and then three series of activities, and then a little bit more
talking at the end, and we have 4 presenters doing that talk together. Kind of (snap snap) a minute
and a half at a time, switching in and out and really keeping it very lively, and very lighthearted.
And we also wanted to, as much as possible, relate all of the content in the workshop to students' everyday experience
with language because they are experts, as Daniel also said, in many ways. People have a lot of knowledge already. They sometimes just
don't realise they have that knowledge.
And it's also really nice for the students to realise that it in many ways they're experts on stuff that their teachers have no idea about.
You know, certain conventions of how you might use punctuation in text messaging, or something like that. They're really switched on about a whole lot of stuff
and they have a lot to offer in a discussion.
We also wanted to pick topics that would generate a lot of discussion and invite different opinions and insights. So some of you
have probably seen the maps, the mapping activity

English: 
that we developed with Lauren as one of the Roadshow activities and then kind of grew legs
and got a lot more attention amongst the wider public because it was an online survey and mapping thing.
And this worked fantastically in the classroom, the students absolutely love it, and they love being able to argue about what word they use and why it might be different,
and bring all of their thoughts to that, so it was a very sucessful activity.
And that activity was one of several, we've done a few different ones, rotating throughout the time
when we run the Roadshow, because we thought it was really important to have accessible activities that give students a really hands-on opportunity
to learn something about how languages work. It's all very well and good to say 'yeah look, in Australian Indigenous languages you might have
these kind of noun classification systems, where you use these bits and put them with these kinds of words'
but if they actually have a puzzle and they need to work that out themselves, then they really get it,
and they feel so pleased with themselves when they work it out, and they're going to remember that.
And as we mentioned earlier, we wanted to show that the content,

English: 
that we developed with Lauren as one of the Roadshow activities and then kind of grew legs
and got a lot more attention amongst the wider public because it was an online survey and mapping thing.
And this worked fantastically in the classroom, the students absolutely love it, and they love being able to argue about what word they use and why it might be different,
and bring all of their thoughts to that, so it was a very sucessful activity.
And that activity was one of several, we've done a few different ones, rotating throughout the time
when we run the Roadshow, because we thought it was really important to have accessible activities that give students a really hands-on opportunity
to learn something about how languages work. It's all very well and good to say 'yeah look, in Australian Indigenous languages you might have
these kind of noun classification systems, where you use these bits and put them with these kinds of words'
but if they actually have a puzzle and they need to work that out themselves, then they really get it,
and they feel so pleased with themselves when they work it out, and they're going to remember that.
And as we mentioned earlier, we wanted to show that the content,

English: 
kind of everything within linguistics touches on so many other disciplines, it's not just this esoteric thing hanging out there on its own.
It really relates to lots of other things that are already being covered in schools and students
are already developing an interest in.
And we have lots of fun souvenirs, which - yes they were fun - but they also had an ulterior motive.
They were stuff that would hang around the house that students would then maybe pick up, and show their parents, or remind them of something they learnt
and so there was a showbag that had all sorts of bits and pieces in there that hopefully maybe cement some of the knowledge or jog their memories
or give someone something else to learn about.
And we want to also really give them the human side of things: Who are we? the people who are presenting the Roadshow
What do we do in our day jobs? What sort of work could linguistics involve and kind of cover all kind of things
there just at the end as a nice way of wrapping up.
KATIE: As we're trying to talk about our audience here,
we tried to get to know our audence better and also engage the students in the talks that were to come by running a little quiz
at the very very beginning, basically we stand up the front, and said

English: 
kind of everything within linguistics touches on so many other disciplines, it's not just this esoteric thing hanging out there on its own.
It really relates to lots of other things that are already being covered in schools and students
are already developing an interest in.
And we have lots of fun souvenirs, which - yes they were fun - but they also had an ulterior motive.
They were stuff that would hang around the house that students would then maybe pick up, and show their parents, or remind them of something they learnt
and so there was a showbag that had all sorts of bits and pieces in there that hopefully maybe cement some of the knowledge or jog their memories
or give someone something else to learn about.
And we want to also really give them the human side of things: Who are we? the people who are presenting the Roadshow
What do we do in our day jobs? What sort of work could linguistics involve and kind of cover all kind of things
there just at the end as a nice way of wrapping up.
KATIE: As we're trying to talk about our audience here,
we tried to get to know our audence better and also engage the students in the talks that were to come by running a little quiz
at the very very beginning, basically we stand up the front, and said

English: 
hello, this is who we are, then we put on a daggy tune and they all do the quiz
It helps to raise some of the questions that we'd be answering later. And they can say 'oh, I didn't get that, oh, I didn't know that'
and it would enable us to then maybe beef up some parts of the talks to reflect what they do and don't know.
So, some of the questions we asked were: 'Is the world gaining or losing languages? Is English getting worse over time?'
'How many Indigenous languages were spoken in Australia at the time of European colonosation?' and indeed, question number 9 is
troubling that almost 70% of students say 'yes, getting worse over time'. What this means? well… ROSEY: There are over 300 students so far.
ROSEY: So, just sort of to wrap up,

English: 
hello, this is who we are, then we put on a daggy tune and they all do the quiz
It helps to raise some of the questions that we'd be answering later. And they can say 'oh, I didn't get that, oh, I didn't know that'
and it would enable us to then maybe beef up some parts of the talks to reflect what they do and don't know.
So, some of the questions we asked were: 'Is the world gaining or losing languages? Is English getting worse over time?'
'How many Indigenous languages were spoken in Australia at the time of European colonosation?' and indeed, question number 9 is
troubling that almost 70% of students say 'yes, getting worse over time'. What this means? well… ROSEY: There are over 300 students so far.
ROSEY: So, just sort of to wrap up,

English: 
there's really enormous scope for doing linguistics outreach work in schools, with the students, with their teachers, with young people generally.
And so we really made some very careful and strategic descisions about who we wanted to reach here,
about the audience in developing this. And then we've also tried to get to know them more as Katie was saying. Also talking to the teachers
and other teacher friends we have in the early planning stages of this. Talking with the students themselves
during the workshop and trying to gauge what they found really exciting or interesting, or, you know, were possibly
bored by, and looking at the results from this quiz. And we found it really helped us. You know, every time we started to get carried away with our big plans,
'we could tell them about this! we could show them this stuff about untranslatable words, and try and explain why they're not really untranslatable'
and go into all of this detail. We sort of keep coming back to 'Okay, hang on, what was our point in developing this, what were our motivations?'
'and what were the three things that we wanted them to get out of it?' Because we figured, if nothing else, if they get something along the lines of
those three messages that are about diversity at the global level, at the Australian level and then
the individual within small speech communities, then that would be a success.

English: 
there's really enormous scope for doing linguistics outreach work in schools, with the students, with their teachers, with young people generally.
And so we really made some very careful and strategic descisions about who we wanted to reach here,
about the audience in developing this. And then we've also tried to get to know them more as Katie was saying. Also talking to the teachers
and other teacher friends we have in the early planning stages of this. Talking with the students themselves
during the workshop and trying to gauge what they found really exciting or interesting, or, you know, were possibly
bored by, and looking at the results from this quiz. And we found it really helped us. You know, every time we started to get carried away with our big plans,
'we could tell them about this! we could show them this stuff about untranslatable words, and try and explain why they're not really untranslatable'
and go into all of this detail. We sort of keep coming back to 'Okay, hang on, what was our point in developing this, what were our motivations?'
'and what were the three things that we wanted them to get out of it?' Because we figured, if nothing else, if they get something along the lines of
those three messages that are about diversity at the global level, at the Australian level and then
the individual within small speech communities, then that would be a success.

English: 
Yes, so that was kind of our measure of success. If they could take away something like that we were happy with how it went. So that really helps you stay focused
and realistic about what we could get done within a two hour workshop when you don't know the students beforehand.
And so the aim is of course to make the message as engaging and accessible as possible for this very targeted audience.
So far, there are about three hundred students so far, and then we've had some other kind of community visits as part of the Roadshow.
Talking in community library and visiting a language centre and things like that.
And our view is that it's not all about numbers, so we really wanted to focus
and we think that this is a nice way of complementing the other kind of wide ranging work that other people are doing when it comes to outreach
by really keeping in mind who it is we're try to work with here and offering something useful too. And, yes, I've already said that, so I think that is it. Thank you.

English: 
Yes, so that was kind of our measure of success. If they could take away something like that we were happy with how it went. So that really helps you stay focused
and realistic about what we could get done within a two hour workshop when you don't know the students beforehand.
And so the aim is of course to make the message as engaging and accessible as possible for this very targeted audience.
So far, there are about three hundred students so far, and then we've had some other kind of community visits as part of the Roadshow.
Talking in community library and visiting a language centre and things like that.
And our view is that it's not all about numbers, so we really wanted to focus
and we think that this is a nice way of complementing the other kind of wide ranging work that other people are doing when it comes to outreach
by really keeping in mind who it is we're try to work with here and offering something useful too. And, yes, I've already said that, so I think that is it. Thank you.

English: 
[APPLAUSE]
It is my great pleasure to introduce the next speaker, Brigdhe Collins. She runs the Research Unit for Indigenous Languages, in an administrative capacity.
So she's the one who makes it run; that's generally what happens when you're an administrator.
Part of that role, she runs the RUIL Twitter account, which she is going to show us now
and that, if you're not following by the end of this talk I'll be very disappointed. So thank you very much, Brigdhe.
BRIGDHE: Yes, so I am the project officer
for the Research Unit for Indigenous Language. We've got about 18 researchers working on languages in Australia
and also in the Pacific region, and then a bunch of PhD students underneath that as well, doing research in the same area.
And my role is, a number of different things,
but I'm going to talk about my project, which is basically producing images like these.

English: 
[APPLAUSE]
It is my great pleasure to introduce the next speaker, Brigdhe Collins. She runs the Research Unit for Indigenous Languages, in an administrative capacity.
So she's the one who makes it run; that's generally what happens when you're an administrator.
Part of that role, she runs the RUIL Twitter account, which she is going to show us now
and that, if you're not following by the end of this talk I'll be very disappointed. So thank you very much, Brigdhe.
BRIGDHE: Yes, so I am the project officer
for the Research Unit for Indigenous Language. We've got about 18 researchers working on languages in Australia
and also in the Pacific region, and then a bunch of PhD students underneath that as well, doing research in the same area.
And my role is, a number of different things,
but I'm going to talk about my project, which is basically producing images like these.

English: 
So, it's a pretty image. It has the word for that image in four different languages, the languages named underneath the word,
and then I've got a link to the sources, or not a link, I've got the sources acknowledged underneath
and then a link to the map,
the Gambay map, produced by First Langauges Australia, where you can see where that language is spoken in Australia.
And I'm focusing just on the Twitter feed. We actually put these on Instagram
and Facebook as well, but they are much less popular than Twitter, so Twitter has become incredibly popular over a short amount of time.
So basically I started out, 'how do we get more followers on Twitter?' We started with three hundred people
who were following us when I started this project in May 2016,
and an average of 8 engagements per tweet, which is really quite low, and we wanted more.

English: 
So, it's a pretty image. It has the word for that image in four different languages, the languages named underneath the word,
and then I've got a link to the sources, or not a link, I've got the sources acknowledged underneath
and then a link to the map,
the Gambay map, produced by First Langauges Australia, where you can see where that language is spoken in Australia.
And I'm focusing just on the Twitter feed. We actually put these on Instagram
and Facebook as well, but they are much less popular than Twitter, so Twitter has become incredibly popular over a short amount of time.
So basically I started out, 'how do we get more followers on Twitter?' We started with three hundred people
who were following us when I started this project in May 2016,
and an average of 8 engagements per tweet, which is really quite low, and we wanted more.

English: 
And someone just said 'a picture tells a thousand words', and I thought 'yeah, well, that's it, that's what we have to do.'
So, they're beautiful, and putting beautiful things in the public sphere is nice. But why? Why do that?
Basically the idea behind it was to get the general public's attention with pretty images, we're increasing our presence on their...
I'm so good at Twitter I can't remember the... their feed! Thank you. Yeah, so, by increasing the pretty pictures they start following us
and everything else that we putm we will also be going onto their feed.
And by doing this we want to increase general knowledge of the work that our researchers do, we want to increase general knowledge
about the work on Indigenous Langauges in Australia,
and also kind of increase awareness of linguistic diversity in Australia, so a very quite general level there.

English: 
And someone just said 'a picture tells a thousand words', and I thought 'yeah, well, that's it, that's what we have to do.'
So, they're beautiful, and putting beautiful things in the public sphere is nice. But why? Why do that?
Basically the idea behind it was to get the general public's attention with pretty images, we're increasing our presence on their...
I'm so good at Twitter I can't remember the... their feed! Thank you. Yeah, so, by increasing the pretty pictures they start following us
and everything else that we putm we will also be going onto their feed.
And by doing this we want to increase general knowledge of the work that our researchers do, we want to increase general knowledge
about the work on Indigenous Langauges in Australia,
and also kind of increase awareness of linguistic diversity in Australia, so a very quite general level there.

English: 
How did we go? So if you look here, this is the average number of likes per month per tweet.
Starting in October 2014, 18 months before I started doing the posts.
and then that arrow line in the middle is when I started doing the tweets.
And you can see in the twenty months after I started doing it, there's been a huge increase in likes across that.
You can see here this is the highest, So I'm looking at November here, which was much higher.
And this is the post that got the highest number of likes so far. It was on November the fifteenth,
and it was quite a politically relevant time.
So it could have been that I really well-synchronised the image that I chose with the situation, but, you know
that's a really good strategic - I didn't just randomly choose a rainbow for that day, and it strategically worked well.

English: 
How did we go? So if you look here, this is the average number of likes per month per tweet.
Starting in October 2014, 18 months before I started doing the posts.
and then that arrow line in the middle is when I started doing the tweets.
And you can see in the twenty months after I started doing it, there's been a huge increase in likes across that.
You can see here this is the highest, So I'm looking at November here, which was much higher.
And this is the post that got the highest number of likes so far. It was on November the fifteenth,
and it was quite a politically relevant time.
So it could have been that I really well-synchronised the image that I chose with the situation, but, you know
that's a really good strategic - I didn't just randomly choose a rainbow for that day, and it strategically worked well.

English: 
Yes, and so you can see we had 185 likes, that's the overall number of likes from people liking and retweeting
but we had 45, around 45 likes directly on our page.
A key thing there is the engagements. So that's not just likes, but also clicks through onto the image, clicks through onto
our Twitter page itself, profile follows after that, which resulted in one.
So if we look at the engagements per tweet, so a much broader interaction from the tweets, again the same pattern follows.
In the 18 months preceding that, we had less than 20 engagements. After that we're going up to 180 -
Nearly 180
in the twenty months after, so a really large increase. Here's a fun one.
And I should say - I don't know where... I'll say it now. So, as well as the pretty image and their words
I try to kind of make it a little bit silly, a little bit jokey - something that will make people go

English: 
Yes, and so you can see we had 185 likes, that's the overall number of likes from people liking and retweeting
but we had 45, around 45 likes directly on our page.
A key thing there is the engagements. So that's not just likes, but also clicks through onto the image, clicks through onto
our Twitter page itself, profile follows after that, which resulted in one.
So if we look at the engagements per tweet, so a much broader interaction from the tweets, again the same pattern follows.
In the 18 months preceding that, we had less than 20 engagements. After that we're going up to 180 -
Nearly 180
in the twenty months after, so a really large increase. Here's a fun one.
And I should say - I don't know where... I'll say it now. So, as well as the pretty image and their words
I try to kind of make it a little bit silly, a little bit jokey - something that will make people go

English: 
'oh, what a dork, calling it "birdy"' - because I kind of feel like that will be more personable.
and it seems to have really worked - people are like 'oh, this is just someone chatting to me.'
Saying something fun.
And so I think a lot of people people might feel more comfortable following something that says that. So here you can see we've got a lot of engagements.
The thing that I really wanted to do when I started this, though,
was not to get people looking at our pictures. I wanted them to look at the stuff we were producing
alongside the pictures. And this is the graph of the average engagement
per non-image tweet. So, all of those, if I take out all of the ones that were for those posts, the tweets about images,
this is what's left, and the trend is still kind of there.
But it's not as hot, as striking I guess. In the first 18 months most engagements were below 10.

English: 
'oh, what a dork, calling it "birdy"' - because I kind of feel like that will be more personable.
and it seems to have really worked - people are like 'oh, this is just someone chatting to me.'
Saying something fun.
And so I think a lot of people people might feel more comfortable following something that says that. So here you can see we've got a lot of engagements.
The thing that I really wanted to do when I started this, though,
was not to get people looking at our pictures. I wanted them to look at the stuff we were producing
alongside the pictures. And this is the graph of the average engagement
per non-image tweet. So, all of those, if I take out all of the ones that were for those posts, the tweets about images,
this is what's left, and the trend is still kind of there.
But it's not as hot, as striking I guess. In the first 18 months most engagements were below 10.

English: 
There was an average of 8, as I said before. Afterward it goes up to, you know, 20-25.
But, you see, I spend more time on creating the word posts and therefore don't tweet as much about other things.
So there's zero for some months, and also when you tweet a lot on a certain month,
So, for NAIDOC week the themes was 'Our languages matter', I was tweeting
two or three tweets a day, therefore more tweets, there's a lower average of engagements per tweet.
Ah, can everyone see?
So these are two examples of tweets people were engaging with from the NAIDOC week kind of thing.
So there's no image directly, but they're links to outside kind of things.
What about for you? So, I imagine that some people are wanting

English: 
There was an average of 8, as I said before. Afterward it goes up to, you know, 20-25.
But, you see, I spend more time on creating the word posts and therefore don't tweet as much about other things.
So there's zero for some months, and also when you tweet a lot on a certain month,
So, for NAIDOC week the themes was 'Our languages matter', I was tweeting
two or three tweets a day, therefore more tweets, there's a lower average of engagements per tweet.
Ah, can everyone see?
So these are two examples of tweets people were engaging with from the NAIDOC week kind of thing.
So there's no image directly, but they're links to outside kind of things.
What about for you? So, I imagine that some people are wanting

English: 
in this audience to think about how to strategically promote what you're doing in the Twitter-sphere.
And so I think that including images within your output is potentially a really… it's a really great way to engage people
with what you're doing. You don't have to necessarily have a direct relevance to what you're doing. If you choose a theme
and you start tweeting about things and you just add photos of clouds or have
an image that grabs someones eye as they're scrolling through, I think it's much more likely to grab their attention.
And it will mean that you're in their radar.
And also to be followed and retweeted by someone who has a high number of followers is obviously a huge boon.
For us, we were really early on supported by someone who is called

English: 
in this audience to think about how to strategically promote what you're doing in the Twitter-sphere.
And so I think that including images within your output is potentially a really… it's a really great way to engage people
with what you're doing. You don't have to necessarily have a direct relevance to what you're doing. If you choose a theme
and you start tweeting about things and you just add photos of clouds or have
an image that grabs someones eye as they're scrolling through, I think it's much more likely to grab their attention.
And it will mean that you're in their radar.
And also to be followed and retweeted by someone who has a high number of followers is obviously a huge boon.
For us, we were really early on supported by someone who is called

English: 
Parrot of the Day, he posts a picture of a parrot every single day. And he's incredibly popular, he retweets us
all the time, and so, early on we were like 'alright, I'm just going to have to include more birds.' [LAUGHTER]
And we did, and so, it's really worked for us. So if you can tailor what you're doing a little bit with your images,
and you can follow certain groups of people and share the word. That's it. [APPLAUSE]
LAUREN: Brighde, being the classic 140-character speaker, and pulling us back into time. Thank you for that very Twitter-friendly short punchy talk. We now have Greg Dickson, who is a man who wears many hats
in the linguistics communication arena, and has worn
many hats over the years. I'm very pleased that he's here today to talk about the Northern Territory Facebook Page that he runs, as another platform, and potentially a

English: 
Parrot of the Day, he posts a picture of a parrot every single day. And he's incredibly popular, he retweets us
all the time, and so, early on we were like 'alright, I'm just going to have to include more birds.' [LAUGHTER]
And we did, and so, it's really worked for us. So if you can tailor what you're doing a little bit with your images,
and you can follow certain groups of people and share the word. That's it. [APPLAUSE]
LAUREN: Brighde, being the classic 140-character speaker, and pulling us back into time. Thank you for that very Twitter-friendly short punchy talk. We now have Greg Dickson, who is a man who wears many hats
in the linguistics communication arena, and has worn
many hats over the years. I'm very pleased that he's here today to talk about the Northern Territory Facebook Page that he runs, as another platform, and potentially a

English: 
really powerful way to communicate linguistics to the public. Thank you, Greg. GREG: Thank you. Not the Northern Territory Facebook page
Just Northern Territory in general, I'm in charge of the whole territory. LAUREN: Oh yeah, no, sorry, the bilingual education Facebook page.
GREG: Yeah. LAUREN: I mean, eventually. GREG: It's in the plan. Yeah, so, I've done a bunch of stuff. And Facebook is one of them.
So Facebook is only one way in which I merge narcissism with linguistic passion.
I think, I don't know, this is just my opinion
but, like, for all of us guys who enjoy doing this there's a degree of narcissism. [LAUGHTER] So, I do lots of stuff, like tweeting
As a pseudo-Kriol speaker myself, and also for the language centre, blogging,
written for the Conversation
and face-to-face stuff, training or public talks. So, I mean these guys are covering most of this stuff. We've got the best linguistics blogger in Australia at the end here.

English: 
really powerful way to communicate linguistics to the public. Thank you, Greg. GREG: Thank you. Not the Northern Territory Facebook page
Just Northern Territory in general, I'm in charge of the whole territory. LAUREN: Oh yeah, no, sorry, the bilingual education Facebook page.
GREG: Yeah. LAUREN: I mean, eventually. GREG: It's in the plan. Yeah, so, I've done a bunch of stuff. And Facebook is one of them.
So Facebook is only one way in which I merge narcissism with linguistic passion.
I think, I don't know, this is just my opinion
but, like, for all of us guys who enjoy doing this there's a degree of narcissism. [LAUGHTER] So, I do lots of stuff, like tweeting
As a pseudo-Kriol speaker myself, and also for the language centre, blogging,
written for the Conversation
and face-to-face stuff, training or public talks. So, I mean these guys are covering most of this stuff. We've got the best linguistics blogger in Australia at the end here.

English: 
a podcaster, a face-to-face person, Twitter-er, ABC expert. Um, but Facebook is the bit that I thought I'd talk about.
So, I mean… so I'll talk about Facebook, but across all these things
there's kind of a shared goal, the purpose of what - the strategy I guess - in what we do is to have a goal
and what you're trying to achieve. Think about your audience carefully, have a strategy
and just give it a go, and I think that last one is probably the one that most people get unstuck on.
This isn't rocket science or anything that hard, just give it a crack and learn by doing.
So that's what I did with this page. I am curious though, does anyone actually got experience administering a Facebook page?
Has anyone thought about it and then gone... nah, I don't know?
OK, so I did this a few years ago wtih the Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory Facebook page. It's kind of weird because

English: 
a podcaster, a face-to-face person, Twitter-er, ABC expert. Um, but Facebook is the bit that I thought I'd talk about.
So, I mean… so I'll talk about Facebook, but across all these things
there's kind of a shared goal, the purpose of what - the strategy I guess - in what we do is to have a goal
and what you're trying to achieve. Think about your audience carefully, have a strategy
and just give it a go, and I think that last one is probably the one that most people get unstuck on.
This isn't rocket science or anything that hard, just give it a crack and learn by doing.
So that's what I did with this page. I am curious though, does anyone actually got experience administering a Facebook page?
Has anyone thought about it and then gone... nah, I don't know?
OK, so I did this a few years ago wtih the Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory Facebook page. It's kind of weird because

English: 
this is completely unaffiliated, unattached and anonymous. There is no organisation behind this,
it's just me going [SILLY VOICE] 'I'm going to talk about bilingual education on Facebook'
And there's no obvious beneficiaries.
Who is this for? Why I did this is because working in the Northern Territory on Indigenous languages just
made me really aware of what a struggle it is for bilingual programs
to be supported and maintained. So I was working for an institute up there in 2008
when they basically tried to really limit the potential for bilingual education to really exist, with the First Four Hours…
Compulsory First Four Hours in English policy, which was awful.
It's been attacked like this a few times over the decades.
So even though we know Bilingual Education is great for Indigenous Languages, it's great for remote communities, it's great for employment in that kind of development, lots of reasons… it's susceptable to attack.

English: 
this is completely unaffiliated, unattached and anonymous. There is no organisation behind this,
it's just me going [SILLY VOICE] 'I'm going to talk about bilingual education on Facebook'
And there's no obvious beneficiaries.
Who is this for? Why I did this is because working in the Northern Territory on Indigenous languages just
made me really aware of what a struggle it is for bilingual programs
to be supported and maintained. So I was working for an institute up there in 2008
when they basically tried to really limit the potential for bilingual education to really exist, with the First Four Hours…
Compulsory First Four Hours in English policy, which was awful.
It's been attacked like this a few times over the decades.
So even though we know Bilingual Education is great for Indigenous Languages, it's great for remote communities, it's great for employment in that kind of development, lots of reasons… it's susceptable to attack.

English: 
What I saw as an issue with those attacks is it has a quite a narrow support base. There's, you know, some really great educators
working in the NT that have a lot of experience with this, but they're busy, they're also public servants.
So they're bound with what they can say
and do. So having a broad base of support for bilingual education I thought would help. And so I just get on Facebook
and tell people why it's a cool thing to do. So that's what I did and it's fun. And it's been pretty successful. And because it's not attached to anything, no one cares if I do it or not.
But you still have to have a strategy. So, thinking about who the audience is, I really just wanted ordinary Territorians,
the people I had in mind, people who are a bit socially aware, people who have kids going to school or work in schools.

English: 
What I saw as an issue with those attacks is it has a quite a narrow support base. There's, you know, some really great educators
working in the NT that have a lot of experience with this, but they're busy, they're also public servants.
So they're bound with what they can say
and do. So having a broad base of support for bilingual education I thought would help. And so I just get on Facebook
and tell people why it's a cool thing to do. So that's what I did and it's fun. And it's been pretty successful. And because it's not attached to anything, no one cares if I do it or not.
But you still have to have a strategy. So, thinking about who the audience is, I really just wanted ordinary Territorians,
the people I had in mind, people who are a bit socially aware, people who have kids going to school or work in schools.

English: 
So that's kind of the primary audience that I think of.
But you always have other people people that will be attracted to what you're doing.So you know there's people around
Australia that are interested in this, there are linguists interested in this, students of linguistics, or other people
Indigenous people in the NT
and outside the NT, because there's a rights issue behind this issue.
And then the hope for everybody is that policymakers and media are also having a look,
and if they see someone posting something they see that's getting a response from the public, it makes media
and policy makers take notice and the best example of this is when my old NT Senator
Federal Senator Trish Crossin gave a talk about bilingual education in the Senate one day, I read what she said
and I was like, 'oh my god she's copied all of that off like the description of my Facebook page!' So, total plagiarism but I was quite happy with that.

English: 
So that's kind of the primary audience that I think of.
But you always have other people people that will be attracted to what you're doing.So you know there's people around
Australia that are interested in this, there are linguists interested in this, students of linguistics, or other people
Indigenous people in the NT
and outside the NT, because there's a rights issue behind this issue.
And then the hope for everybody is that policymakers and media are also having a look,
and if they see someone posting something they see that's getting a response from the public, it makes media
and policy makers take notice and the best example of this is when my old NT Senator
Federal Senator Trish Crossin gave a talk about bilingual education in the Senate one day, I read what she said
and I was like, 'oh my god she's copied all of that off like the description of my Facebook page!' So, total plagiarism but I was quite happy with that.

English: 
And then, I don't know, it's hard to know how to do this well. I just sort of think, look, if you can write well,
— if you're in this business, they call it copy —
if you do good copy, then it's really going to help. Think about your audience. When you go on to Facebook,
if you're a Facebook user, you know what you like to see when you're on Facebook. So just think, if you're a follower of my page, what sort of things are you going to want to see when you log onto Facebook?
Your don't want to be bombarded with the same thing all the time, you want something that's either going to brighten your day,
give you a little bit of self-righteous, I don't know, social 'I care about this issue' thing, all those little things that you think
your audience might want to see. And within these parameters, my approach is really try to mix it up.
So I'll do posts that refer to different languages of the Northern Territory, or even

English: 
And then, I don't know, it's hard to know how to do this well. I just sort of think, look, if you can write well,
— if you're in this business, they call it copy —
if you do good copy, then it's really going to help. Think about your audience. When you go on to Facebook,
if you're a Facebook user, you know what you like to see when you're on Facebook. So just think, if you're a follower of my page, what sort of things are you going to want to see when you log onto Facebook?
Your don't want to be bombarded with the same thing all the time, you want something that's either going to brighten your day,
give you a little bit of self-righteous, I don't know, social 'I care about this issue' thing, all those little things that you think
your audience might want to see. And within these parameters, my approach is really try to mix it up.
So I'll do posts that refer to different languages of the Northern Territory, or even

English: 
go international, I'll do some posts that are really short, or some that have a lot of explanation, some posts that are actually just educational ones
where people learn something, and some that are much lighter. And different frequencies. I might be busy or I don't post for three weeks.
Or there might be something going on that week and I'll do a few posts in a week. I really don't have any hard and fast rules. No one cares if I'm doing this or not anyway, as I said.
But you know, I like mixing it up because it means the audience isn't getting bored or finding it all too samey.
So anyway, feel free to have a look and follow if you like.
Just some examples. So this is what I would call a bread-and-butter post,
which is when something comes up in the media that is specifically about bilingual education, specifically about a language,
it's got Indigenous people being advocates for bilingual education. This is the stuff that if I see it come up in the media
or anywhere, I'm like 'great, sharing that, totally.' And it always gets a good response because all my followers are - they think this is an important issue.

English: 
go international, I'll do some posts that are really short, or some that have a lot of explanation, some posts that are actually just educational ones
where people learn something, and some that are much lighter. And different frequencies. I might be busy or I don't post for three weeks.
Or there might be something going on that week and I'll do a few posts in a week. I really don't have any hard and fast rules. No one cares if I'm doing this or not anyway, as I said.
But you know, I like mixing it up because it means the audience isn't getting bored or finding it all too samey.
So anyway, feel free to have a look and follow if you like.
Just some examples. So this is what I would call a bread-and-butter post,
which is when something comes up in the media that is specifically about bilingual education, specifically about a language,
it's got Indigenous people being advocates for bilingual education. This is the stuff that if I see it come up in the media
or anywhere, I'm like 'great, sharing that, totally.' And it always gets a good response because all my followers are - they think this is an important issue.

English: 
So this is just a post, and you can see - so the page at the moment has just over 1800
people liking or following it. So my little measure is: if it goes beyond that 1800, that means it's being shared, it's found a larger audience.
That's just my little measure that I like
to see if it actually reaches more than who actually likes the page. So this post did well, that sort of bread-and-butter thing.
And it's just me keeping an eye on what stories pop up in the media, or
what my friends are sharing. And then I'll put it on that page.
This is more of a mix-it-up post, where I just saw this on Twitter once so I screenshotted it. So the tweet, it says
you know, this ignorant type person saying 'It's rude not speaking English in public places'
and then the response 'Oh, does it remind you that you can only speak one language? LOL'.
Just a nice little tweet I screenshotted and put it up there, cheeky and a monkey face. And it's easy.

English: 
So this is just a post, and you can see - so the page at the moment has just over 1800
people liking or following it. So my little measure is: if it goes beyond that 1800, that means it's being shared, it's found a larger audience.
That's just my little measure that I like
to see if it actually reaches more than who actually likes the page. So this post did well, that sort of bread-and-butter thing.
And it's just me keeping an eye on what stories pop up in the media, or
what my friends are sharing. And then I'll put it on that page.
This is more of a mix-it-up post, where I just saw this on Twitter once so I screenshotted it. So the tweet, it says
you know, this ignorant type person saying 'It's rude not speaking English in public places'
and then the response 'Oh, does it remind you that you can only speak one language? LOL'.
Just a nice little tweet I screenshotted and put it up there, cheeky and a monkey face. And it's easy.

English: 
But yeah, it just mixes it up so they're not getting bombarded with the same 'you need to keep learning about bilingual education in the Northern Territory' type thing.
And the other thing, I mean you sort of get these do's and don'ts
and some people think that just having a text-only post is too boring
but sometimes if I do them, they get a reasonable response. So this is just — there was a symposium
and I saw someone quote this on Twitter, Yalmay Yunupiŋu saying 'I consider Yolŋu children to be
as clever as anyone else... I don't want their cleverness left outside the classroom door.' It's just a lovely quote - so, I saw that,
put that up there, gets a good response. So that was cool.
Some people might say, if it's good content it works.
And then so all these little strategies, sometimes I get a chance to - I guess - bring it home. I mean, I'm not selling anything.
I want people to care about this issue, but there's nothing that I'm going to be driving people to do.

English: 
But yeah, it just mixes it up so they're not getting bombarded with the same 'you need to keep learning about bilingual education in the Northern Territory' type thing.
And the other thing, I mean you sort of get these do's and don'ts
and some people think that just having a text-only post is too boring
but sometimes if I do them, they get a reasonable response. So this is just — there was a symposium
and I saw someone quote this on Twitter, Yalmay Yunupiŋu saying 'I consider Yolŋu children to be
as clever as anyone else... I don't want their cleverness left outside the classroom door.' It's just a lovely quote - so, I saw that,
put that up there, gets a good response. So that was cool.
Some people might say, if it's good content it works.
And then so all these little strategies, sometimes I get a chance to - I guess - bring it home. I mean, I'm not selling anything.
I want people to care about this issue, but there's nothing that I'm going to be driving people to do.

English: 
But if I come across things like this, which is a remote school who's looking for a teacher
and they've got a great bilingual program and a great philosophy behind the school, and they want a teacher, and I can amplify that call for staff.
This is fantastic. So this was only last week, and I screenshotted their flyer
and put all the text there with all the details. Because it's an image, people are likely share it more,
and I got a really great response, and it got shared quite a lot.
And, I mean, maybe one or two of those people who see that are going to think about applying. But there's 4000 people
that have seen that, they've seen a remote school being active about the use of Indigenous language in a remote school, and so that's a goal in itself.
So that's pretty fun. So you can do this sort of thing about anything that you might be really passionate about in linguistics.
Whether it's, I don't know, there's a certain type of verb

English: 
But if I come across things like this, which is a remote school who's looking for a teacher
and they've got a great bilingual program and a great philosophy behind the school, and they want a teacher, and I can amplify that call for staff.
This is fantastic. So this was only last week, and I screenshotted their flyer
and put all the text there with all the details. Because it's an image, people are likely share it more,
and I got a really great response, and it got shared quite a lot.
And, I mean, maybe one or two of those people who see that are going to think about applying. But there's 4000 people
that have seen that, they've seen a remote school being active about the use of Indigenous language in a remote school, and so that's a goal in itself.
So that's pretty fun. So you can do this sort of thing about anything that you might be really passionate about in linguistics.
Whether it's, I don't know, there's a certain type of verb

English: 
or there's a verb you like in Australian English and you just want to celebrate that verb. My favourite verb is 'bags', I bags that.
If I ran a Facebook page about an Australian English verb it would be 'bags'.
and I'd just find examples of it and make people love 'bags'. I don't know, anything that you get excited about, give it a crack.
Um, if you are making a Facebook page, be ready for Facebook to try and get your money.
They'll always be like 'boost your post, and buy more likes and blah blah blah'.
I ignore all of it. I figure that if I'm making it interesting and doing good copy and I have a following, people are going to like it and respond to it anyway.
It might work. I just don't go there. Yeah, so I think if there's a reason for people to like what you're doing, they will see it.
And Facebook has all these algorithms, so Facebook

English: 
or there's a verb you like in Australian English and you just want to celebrate that verb. My favourite verb is 'bags', I bags that.
If I ran a Facebook page about an Australian English verb it would be 'bags'.
and I'd just find examples of it and make people love 'bags'. I don't know, anything that you get excited about, give it a crack.
Um, if you are making a Facebook page, be ready for Facebook to try and get your money.
They'll always be like 'boost your post, and buy more likes and blah blah blah'.
I ignore all of it. I figure that if I'm making it interesting and doing good copy and I have a following, people are going to like it and respond to it anyway.
It might work. I just don't go there. Yeah, so I think if there's a reason for people to like what you're doing, they will see it.
And Facebook has all these algorithms, so Facebook

English: 
now - years ago it was different - if you post a YouTube video, it disappears really quickly because YouTube's run by Google, and is owned by Google.
If you post anything directly from Twitter, it disappears really quickly. I even wonder if that screenshot I did of Twitter…
Facebook knows I'm showing something from Twitter!
And they try and bury it away, so you have to know these little things. Well, you sort of get a hunch of what Facebook is trying to do.
The other thing is that likes aren't everything, so some people just get excited about the fact that you've got 1811 likes
and that means my page is doing really well. But you might have that many, but your posts kind of flop and you might get one or two likes.
So, this is only just one little thing, and it's nice to keep in mind the other impacts that your posts might make.
Occasionally I get a message from a student who is doing a high school assignment 'Can you tell me which schools teach bilingual education in the Northern Territory?" Great — someone cares!

English: 
now - years ago it was different - if you post a YouTube video, it disappears really quickly because YouTube's run by Google, and is owned by Google.
If you post anything directly from Twitter, it disappears really quickly. I even wonder if that screenshot I did of Twitter…
Facebook knows I'm showing something from Twitter!
And they try and bury it away, so you have to know these little things. Well, you sort of get a hunch of what Facebook is trying to do.
The other thing is that likes aren't everything, so some people just get excited about the fact that you've got 1811 likes
and that means my page is doing really well. But you might have that many, but your posts kind of flop and you might get one or two likes.
So, this is only just one little thing, and it's nice to keep in mind the other impacts that your posts might make.
Occasionally I get a message from a student who is doing a high school assignment 'Can you tell me which schools teach bilingual education in the Northern Territory?" Great — someone cares!

English: 
You know or just how many people share
or how many people - just - you can see that there's an interesting article in the Conversation that you shared - you can see that people are reading it
but maybe there's not commenting, maybe they're not liking it, but you know that people are clicking through. You get that sort of information.
And so that's enough to know you're doing something that might be useful. So don't be too worried about all these 'don'ts', just like I said, if you want to do this sort of stuff,
give it a crack, this takes me - I don't know - I might spend 10 minutes a week on it. Probably in the train on the way home.
or something. So that's really easy and it's fun. Alright that's what I do, so if you like applying what you to do Facebook that might help. [APPLAUSE]
LAUREN: Hi, I'm Lauren, I've been introducing everone else, so I'll just continue by introducing myself. Greg mentioned that a lot of the time we're motivated by just a little bit of narcissism.

English: 
You know or just how many people share
or how many people - just - you can see that there's an interesting article in the Conversation that you shared - you can see that people are reading it
but maybe there's not commenting, maybe they're not liking it, but you know that people are clicking through. You get that sort of information.
And so that's enough to know you're doing something that might be useful. So don't be too worried about all these 'don'ts', just like I said, if you want to do this sort of stuff,
give it a crack, this takes me - I don't know - I might spend 10 minutes a week on it. Probably in the train on the way home.
or something. So that's really easy and it's fun. Alright that's what I do, so if you like applying what you to do Facebook that might help. [APPLAUSE]
LAUREN: Hi, I'm Lauren, I've been introducing everone else, so I'll just continue by introducing myself. Greg mentioned that a lot of the time we're motivated by just a little bit of narcissism.

English: 
And I think we're also motivated by a little bit of megalomania, and that is certainly what has prompted me to bring all these amazing people together for this workshop is that
I want to see more linguistics out there.
So in my own capacity, as somone who cares a lot about engagement with
people about linguistics and
explain to people how language works and why linguistics is cool, I've been writing Superlinguo for the last 7 years.
That was a collaborative project, and then I took it on.
And for the last year Gretchen McCulloch and I have been running Lingthusiasm, which is a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics.
And those two projects are in many ways a really nice balance with my academic life.
And I really love doing really intense specific research on interactional uses of evidentiality in various Tibetic languages.

English: 
And I think we're also motivated by a little bit of megalomania, and that is certainly what has prompted me to bring all these amazing people together for this workshop is that
I want to see more linguistics out there.
So in my own capacity, as somone who cares a lot about engagement with
people about linguistics and
explain to people how language works and why linguistics is cool, I've been writing Superlinguo for the last 7 years.
That was a collaborative project, and then I took it on.
And for the last year Gretchen McCulloch and I have been running Lingthusiasm, which is a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics.
And those two projects are in many ways a really nice balance with my academic life.
And I really love doing really intense specific research on interactional uses of evidentiality in various Tibetic languages.

English: 
But for me it's also an opportunity to share my general passion for linguistics
and sometimes my passion for particular evidentials in Tibeto-Burman languages.
That allows me to kind of feel motivated and refreshed moving back and forth between the two.
And hopefully today these these talks have given you some really great ideas about how you can connect with people
and why you might be rewarded to do so. But I'm also aware that we are all human
and we're all motivated by really selfish wants by really selfish 'what's in it for me' motivation.
and so, I wanted to bring to this conversation a little bit of that kind of realistic 'what's in it for me?' discussion
because it is really great if you have the time or the energy to run a Facebook page,
it's really great if you invest the time in joining a blog or
building up a Twitter following with some people around a topic,

English: 
But for me it's also an opportunity to share my general passion for linguistics
and sometimes my passion for particular evidentials in Tibeto-Burman languages.
That allows me to kind of feel motivated and refreshed moving back and forth between the two.
And hopefully today these these talks have given you some really great ideas about how you can connect with people
and why you might be rewarded to do so. But I'm also aware that we are all human
and we're all motivated by really selfish wants by really selfish 'what's in it for me' motivation.
and so, I wanted to bring to this conversation a little bit of that kind of realistic 'what's in it for me?' discussion
because it is really great if you have the time or the energy to run a Facebook page,
it's really great if you invest the time in joining a blog or
building up a Twitter following with some people around a topic,

English: 
but these are actually skills that can help you with your academic work as well.
And so for me the pop linguistics stuff helps me feel excited still about the work that I do,
but the pop-linguistics, the linguistics communication stuff that I do also gives me skills that reinform my academic work.
And so I just want to focus very briefly on two of those things. The first thing is: is that
writing linguistic communication
or working in a general public kind of sphere is really exciting in terms of publishing deadlines,
and gives you a kind of a different take on these things. So this is a lovely paper, and it's just an example that
I noticed because I was waiting a very long time for it to have a publishing date,
but this is a paper that was accepted at the end of 2014 and didn't come out until 2017.
And this is not an atypical story in linguistics

English: 
but these are actually skills that can help you with your academic work as well.
And so for me the pop linguistics stuff helps me feel excited still about the work that I do,
but the pop-linguistics, the linguistics communication stuff that I do also gives me skills that reinform my academic work.
And so I just want to focus very briefly on two of those things. The first thing is: is that
writing linguistic communication
or working in a general public kind of sphere is really exciting in terms of publishing deadlines,
and gives you a kind of a different take on these things. So this is a lovely paper, and it's just an example that
I noticed because I was waiting a very long time for it to have a publishing date,
but this is a paper that was accepted at the end of 2014 and didn't come out until 2017.
And this is not an atypical story in linguistics

English: 
or in any academic publishing, and so it was available as a preprint for a long time,
but you get this very long lag between when you write an academic paper or when you prepare for a conference and then
when you actually get to deliver that content. And that can sometimes feel a bit frustrating.
It can sometimes feel a bit frustrating, you can sometimes feel like you're spinning your wheels.
But it can also mean that we fall into the
slow burn trap and we think 'well, if this paper is going to take 6 months to get reviewed, I'm probably not going
to take less than six months to get around to writing it in the first place.'
Whereas when you write for a general audience you're much more liberated from that kind of academic glacial timeline
I mean, because you're generally not presenting primary research, you're presenting summary information.

English: 
or in any academic publishing, and so it was available as a preprint for a long time,
but you get this very long lag between when you write an academic paper or when you prepare for a conference and then
when you actually get to deliver that content. And that can sometimes feel a bit frustrating.
It can sometimes feel a bit frustrating, you can sometimes feel like you're spinning your wheels.
But it can also mean that we fall into the
slow burn trap and we think 'well, if this paper is going to take 6 months to get reviewed, I'm probably not going
to take less than six months to get around to writing it in the first place.'
Whereas when you write for a general audience you're much more liberated from that kind of academic glacial timeline
I mean, because you're generally not presenting primary research, you're presenting summary information.

English: 
And so, another thing that I do regularly is I write a short column at the back of The Big Issue, if you ever do the crossword you
may see that there. And so every two weeks I have to come up with another little thing and I have to finish it.
And compared to the academic paper I've been working on for six months, saying I have finished a discrete thing and
delivered it and it's in print is a nice change of pace from Academia.
And not only have you been able to publish things faster, it helps you become quicker at writing.
Writing a blog for many years has taught me to get a very quick version down fast. It's taught me to
kind of not worry about editing until something is there
and that's definitely informed my academic writing, I feel much better about facing a blank page because I have to do it
every two weights for The Big Issue, so starting an academic article suddenly becomes a lot less daunting.
The other thing that it can provide,

English: 
And so, another thing that I do regularly is I write a short column at the back of The Big Issue, if you ever do the crossword you
may see that there. And so every two weeks I have to come up with another little thing and I have to finish it.
And compared to the academic paper I've been working on for six months, saying I have finished a discrete thing and
delivered it and it's in print is a nice change of pace from Academia.
And not only have you been able to publish things faster, it helps you become quicker at writing.
Writing a blog for many years has taught me to get a very quick version down fast. It's taught me to
kind of not worry about editing until something is there
and that's definitely informed my academic writing, I feel much better about facing a blank page because I have to do it
every two weights for The Big Issue, so starting an academic article suddenly becomes a lot less daunting.
The other thing that it can provide,

English: 
you with in terms of skills, if you hone your linguistic communication skills
is when it comes time to write
genres that you may not experience all the time that suddenly you have to become very very good at
and so this is one that is obviously
kind of weighing on my mind at the moment is the DECRA landscape for the Australian Research Council.
And in these proposals, which are very long extensive things, but what people often trip up on are these very short pithy
statements that need to be written, and they need to be written for an intelligent, non-linguist audience.
And we definitely heard some people on the panel here today mention that they have experience pitching to that level of audience.
And so these are just two parts of that DECRA application that require you to think
about your academic topic in a way that's very different from how you may have written about it up until this point in your career.

English: 
you with in terms of skills, if you hone your linguistic communication skills
is when it comes time to write
genres that you may not experience all the time that suddenly you have to become very very good at
and so this is one that is obviously
kind of weighing on my mind at the moment is the DECRA landscape for the Australian Research Council.
And in these proposals, which are very long extensive things, but what people often trip up on are these very short pithy
statements that need to be written, and they need to be written for an intelligent, non-linguist audience.
And we definitely heard some people on the panel here today mention that they have experience pitching to that level of audience.
And so these are just two parts of that DECRA application that require you to think
about your academic topic in a way that's very different from how you may have written about it up until this point in your career.

English: 
So between learning to write faster, and learning to write technically complex information
in a non-technical way, there are two really great things that you can gain as benefits from communicating linguistics
to a wider audience. So thank you. I'm just going to slide straight into - in the interest of making up time - the next talk.
I'm very pleased that Tiger Webb could come down here today. Tiger has many jobs at the ABC,
but one of them - and I think the one he'll be talking about today is as the ABC Language... what is your official title?
TIGER: Researcher. LAUREN: Researcher. So, he's ABC's Language Researcher.
If we manage to get through to question time, we can all ask him about what it was like to call up
and find out about how to pronounce the prime minister of New Zealand's name,

English: 
So between learning to write faster, and learning to write technically complex information
in a non-technical way, there are two really great things that you can gain as benefits from communicating linguistics
to a wider audience. So thank you. I'm just going to slide straight into - in the interest of making up time - the next talk.
I'm very pleased that Tiger Webb could come down here today. Tiger has many jobs at the ABC,
but one of them - and I think the one he'll be talking about today is as the ABC Language... what is your official title?
TIGER: Researcher. LAUREN: Researcher. So, he's ABC's Language Researcher.
If we manage to get through to question time, we can all ask him about what it was like to call up
and find out about how to pronounce the prime minister of New Zealand's name,

English: 
but I'll leave him to talk about some of his work, and communicating linguistics from another sphere. [APPLAUSE]
TIGER: Good news, my talk will not be very long. I'm mostly here
to hear I hope from all of you. I know, as Daniel said, the media is not always the best at communicating linguistics
or any aspect of science and so I'm happy to be asking questions today. I'm on Twitter,
you can also email language@abc.net.au
If you have any questions about particularly the ABC, but general sort of media and I've been working in digital and social strategy for a while as well.
So I guess the thing that I do at the ABC is twofold: I look after two similarly-named but quite distinct little bits.
The thing you see in front of you this is

English: 
but I'll leave him to talk about some of his work, and communicating linguistics from another sphere. [APPLAUSE]
TIGER: Good news, my talk will not be very long. I'm mostly here
to hear I hope from all of you. I know, as Daniel said, the media is not always the best at communicating linguistics
or any aspect of science and so I'm happy to be asking questions today. I'm on Twitter,
you can also email language@abc.net.au
If you have any questions about particularly the ABC, but general sort of media and I've been working in digital and social strategy for a while as well.
So I guess the thing that I do at the ABC is twofold: I look after two similarly-named but quite distinct little bits.
The thing you see in front of you this is

English: 
ABC Pronounce, has anyone seen this before? Anyone - ah - two, three hands, four, five — fantastic! That may be unfortunately a greater number than
within the ABC. [LAUGHTER] This is a pronunciation database that I've inherited. It used to be called SCOSE database,
which was an acronym that stood for the Standing Committee on Spoken English. That was deemed too magisterial and so we changed it to the friendly ABC Pronounce.
It's about my age, I inherited it, it's been going since the 50s, about forty thousand headwords strong,
and as you can read from the body copy it's basically for broadcasters, but also for everyone — it's publically accessible — to find very general,
and as you can see, not super robust, pronunciation of placenames and people's names all across the world.
Like me, the pronunciation key doesn't deal particularly well with with stress. [LAUGHTER]
And a bunch of other things as well, but, ah, it's there and it's pretty good. The other thing I will have to

English: 
ABC Pronounce, has anyone seen this before? Anyone - ah - two, three hands, four, five — fantastic! That may be unfortunately a greater number than
within the ABC. [LAUGHTER] This is a pronunciation database that I've inherited. It used to be called SCOSE database,
which was an acronym that stood for the Standing Committee on Spoken English. That was deemed too magisterial and so we changed it to the friendly ABC Pronounce.
It's about my age, I inherited it, it's been going since the 50s, about forty thousand headwords strong,
and as you can read from the body copy it's basically for broadcasters, but also for everyone — it's publically accessible — to find very general,
and as you can see, not super robust, pronunciation of placenames and people's names all across the world.
Like me, the pronunciation key doesn't deal particularly well with with stress. [LAUGHTER]
And a bunch of other things as well, but, ah, it's there and it's pretty good. The other thing I will have to

English: 
- and perhaps something I'm now a bit known for, weirdly - is this thing called… every month we have these meetings for ABC Language,
which is an in-house usage body that looks at the way broadcasters around, not just the ABC, but
commercial as well, talk about things, or write about things, also what complaints we receive from the
greater Australian public, areas we might fall down in coverage, terminology, a whole range of things. And so I compile reports every month and we go to a meeting,
and we argue about it — you know, is there a difference between saying 'flat' or 'apartment'?
does one connote a socio-economic status, the other may not? - that's a real discussion we had.
Zan Rowe from Triple J was there, I don't imagine she got much out of it. But those are my two different hats that I do.
I think there's a thing I want to say, which is that often
when you're thinking about outreach, you're thinking about media, they go do, they get some outreach

English: 
- and perhaps something I'm now a bit known for, weirdly - is this thing called… every month we have these meetings for ABC Language,
which is an in-house usage body that looks at the way broadcasters around, not just the ABC, but
commercial as well, talk about things, or write about things, also what complaints we receive from the
greater Australian public, areas we might fall down in coverage, terminology, a whole range of things. And so I compile reports every month and we go to a meeting,
and we argue about it — you know, is there a difference between saying 'flat' or 'apartment'?
does one connote a socio-economic status, the other may not? - that's a real discussion we had.
Zan Rowe from Triple J was there, I don't imagine she got much out of it. But those are my two different hats that I do.
I think there's a thing I want to say, which is that often
when you're thinking about outreach, you're thinking about media, they go do, they get some outreach

English: 
and people tend to actually not remember that audio or radio exists, I think because it is
quite invisible and ephemeral, but there are about, I think 1300, 1400 radio transmitters in Australia. The ABC has over 60 radio stations,
some are national, some are local. The point I'm trying to make here is that it has many outlets.
There are just so many places to go, there aren't many print publications,
you know, still remaining, and so radio is robust and it endures, it has many places you can go.
You can also make your own, as indeed Lauren has done. Many people do that, it's a perfectly good route, and really inexpensive compared to starting a television station, I can tell you that much.
Um, I may disagree with some things we heard earlier on the panel
on the panel and say that compared to some other forms of media outreach you may do, radio can be very low-risk, or generally
is very low-risk and very friendly, certainly the ABC everyone is

English: 
and people tend to actually not remember that audio or radio exists, I think because it is
quite invisible and ephemeral, but there are about, I think 1300, 1400 radio transmitters in Australia. The ABC has over 60 radio stations,
some are national, some are local. The point I'm trying to make here is that it has many outlets.
There are just so many places to go, there aren't many print publications,
you know, still remaining, and so radio is robust and it endures, it has many places you can go.
You can also make your own, as indeed Lauren has done. Many people do that, it's a perfectly good route, and really inexpensive compared to starting a television station, I can tell you that much.
Um, I may disagree with some things we heard earlier on the panel
on the panel and say that compared to some other forms of media outreach you may do, radio can be very low-risk, or generally
is very low-risk and very friendly, certainly the ABC everyone is

English: 
very happy to have you on, you can wear no shoes, if you like. No one will ever find out if your social media selfie has the table there.
You can even do shorts, I've done that. So helpful for people who may come from a more tropical climate.
Writing for radio is a skill that I could talk about all day, but I know personally for me it's helped be concise, and also
if you've ever had that experience where you write out something and then later - maybe it's a written publication - and then you say it out loud - and you think
'none of this makes sense, what have I done here? This is not a good piece of copy I've created.' Writing for radio, because you have to say it out loud
and your mouth is forced physically to wrap around the various vowels and consonants,
it's a good way of really condensing your thoughts, it's really helpful again, I've found. One last thing on audio is that,

English: 
very happy to have you on, you can wear no shoes, if you like. No one will ever find out if your social media selfie has the table there.
You can even do shorts, I've done that. So helpful for people who may come from a more tropical climate.
Writing for radio is a skill that I could talk about all day, but I know personally for me it's helped be concise, and also
if you've ever had that experience where you write out something and then later - maybe it's a written publication - and then you say it out loud - and you think
'none of this makes sense, what have I done here? This is not a good piece of copy I've created.' Writing for radio, because you have to say it out loud
and your mouth is forced physically to wrap around the various vowels and consonants,
it's a good way of really condensing your thoughts, it's really helpful again, I've found. One last thing on audio is that,

English: 
particularly at the ABC,
an organisation that is trusted by Australians more than any other,
if you do a talkback spot, or a couple of talkback spots, or you pitch
to write an opinion piece when somebody gets angry about vocal fry, whatever it is, that gives you a sort of profile
and a sort of trust with audiences that is very real
and can translate quite widely. Often I'm confronted at parties because of my ABC sheen - it's very awkward.
Just rushing through this, we'll get to questions, I know I'm running a bit over, but
again, find me after this if you have questions about working with media
more specifically. But one thing I will just stress here, is that producers are the backbone and gateway,
and gatekeepers, to basically any form of media, and they're often one that are often quite neglected, you think 'I've got this great

English: 
particularly at the ABC,
an organisation that is trusted by Australians more than any other,
if you do a talkback spot, or a couple of talkback spots, or you pitch
to write an opinion piece when somebody gets angry about vocal fry, whatever it is, that gives you a sort of profile
and a sort of trust with audiences that is very real
and can translate quite widely. Often I'm confronted at parties because of my ABC sheen - it's very awkward.
Just rushing through this, we'll get to questions, I know I'm running a bit over, but
again, find me after this if you have questions about working with media
more specifically. But one thing I will just stress here, is that producers are the backbone and gateway,
and gatekeepers, to basically any form of media, and they're often one that are often quite neglected, you think 'I've got this great

English: 
publication coming out, and wouldn't it be great to go on the science show with Robyn Williams, it gets millions of downloads a year, he's this broadcasting legend'.
He has a producer, his name is David Fisher. Call the producer, the producer is always the person in charge, and that holds generally speaking for television,
it holds generally speaking for online, and the news producers as well. But particularly for radio. It is usually a producer who is the gatekeeper,
between you, or your organisation, and wider exposure.
Really friendly hack I can disclose: if you want to email anyone at the ABC - firstname-dot-lastname@abc.net.au
or call someone up and ask. They will actually put you through, or they will tell you who the appropriate person is,
if you want to go on Away, or you want to go on Speaking Up, they will tell you. I mean, provided you contact them in good faith, which I assume all of you will.
I guess other things here have been sort of touched on. Think about regularity. You might have a local station, be it a community or public.

English: 
publication coming out, and wouldn't it be great to go on the science show with Robyn Williams, it gets millions of downloads a year, he's this broadcasting legend'.
He has a producer, his name is David Fisher. Call the producer, the producer is always the person in charge, and that holds generally speaking for television,
it holds generally speaking for online, and the news producers as well. But particularly for radio. It is usually a producer who is the gatekeeper,
between you, or your organisation, and wider exposure.
Really friendly hack I can disclose: if you want to email anyone at the ABC - firstname-dot-lastname@abc.net.au
or call someone up and ask. They will actually put you through, or they will tell you who the appropriate person is,
if you want to go on Away, or you want to go on Speaking Up, they will tell you. I mean, provided you contact them in good faith, which I assume all of you will.
I guess other things here have been sort of touched on. Think about regularity. You might have a local station, be it a community or public.

English: 
As Lauren said there is really great value in committing, even to one 5-minute segment a month, about general linguistics
or about your own research, and that's something that content-hungry producers and hosts
of shows really really like. They love to be able to rely on people,
and be able to have people come in and say 'you just don't have to worry about planning this 5 minutes once a month'
So that's a really powerful idea you can take with you
and something you can offer as well. You can say 'I'm willing to show up in a radio studio for five minutes on every fourth Wednesday.'
I think that's it from for now, so thanks. [APPLAUSE]

English: 
As Lauren said there is really great value in committing, even to one 5-minute segment a month, about general linguistics
or about your own research, and that's something that content-hungry producers and hosts
of shows really really like. They love to be able to rely on people,
and be able to have people come in and say 'you just don't have to worry about planning this 5 minutes once a month'
So that's a really powerful idea you can take with you
and something you can offer as well. You can say 'I'm willing to show up in a radio studio for five minutes on every fourth Wednesday.'
I think that's it from for now, so thanks. [APPLAUSE]
