Meetings

Once again the lab is meeting on a reduced schedule, to accommodate all of the work members are doing on the MI Diaries project. But we still have some important sessions, so we invite everyone to join us! Meetings will be held virtually via Zoom unless otherwise advertised. Please contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner (wagnersu@msu.edu) if you would like to have the Zoom details, and/or join the lab’s e-mail list, sociolab@list.msu.edu.

Here’s our line-up so far. The meetings are 3:00-4:00pm, Eastern time.

Monday, February 14th, 2022

Yongqing Ye and Adam Barnhardt. Practice talk for Illinois Language & Linguistics Society.

Monday, February 28th, 2022

Suzanne Wagner. Practice talk for CLARe 5.

Monday, March 18th, 2022

Jack Rechsteiner. Practice talk for Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

Monday, March 28th, 2022

Arlo Kaczor. MA thesis project.

Welcome ‘back’ to the Socio Lab! Our lab meetings this semester will be on Zoom, 2-3pm Mondays, every other week. Check the calendar to see what’s coming up when. Everyone is welcome to our lab meetings. We invite you to come and try them out. There is no expectation that you’ll commit to coming regularly, although we hope you will.

At lab meetings, you’ll hear people give practice talks for conferences and academic defenses, update on their research projects, share skills they’ve learned, and workshop ideas for new projects (e.g. senior thesis/Honors Option, MA thesis, doctoral qualifying papers etc). Sometimes we read a study together and discuss it. Contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner if you’d like the Zoom link and password.

This semester we’re also running weekly meetings for the MI-COVID Diaries project team. This group meets Thursdays 5-6pm on Microsoft Teams. The project launched just after Michigan went into coronavirus lockdown. It’s collecting audio diaries from Michigan residents about their pandemic experiences. Contact Dr. Betsy Sneller to join a meeting and see if you’d like to get involved.

Finally, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, members of the lab came together to discuss a seminal paper by John R. Rickford and Sharese King. We’re now running a bi-weekly Anti-Racism Accountability Group for anyone who would like to learn more about anti-racism, and most importantly, who is looking for a community to nudge them to do anti-racist work in academia. The group meets bi-weekly on Mondays, 2-3pm on Microsoft Teams. Contact Jared Kaczor to find out more.

We’re running a workshop to introduce people to the basics of using ELAN transcription and annotation software. It’s a free, flexible and widely-used tool for creating time-aligned transcriptions of audio and video recordings. You can also add multiple tiers of annotation, which is very helpful for various kinds of linguistic coding. It’s become a standard tool in sociolinguistics. 

If you are affiliated with MSU and you’d like to join us, please use this link to indicate your interest. The workshop will be held on Wednesday, September 11th, 2:15 – 3:45pm in B-125 Wells Hall. The room has Windows computers for your use, or you can bring your own laptop. 

Thanks to everyone who came to our organizational meeting this morning! We’ve tentatively settled on Wednesdays, 2:10pm – 3:45pm as our regular fall semester 2019 weekly meeting time. Friday afternoons will be our backup time in weeks when we need an additional meeting, or can’t meet on Wednesday.

To keep up to date with our meeting schedule and topics, you can subscribe to our mailing list, and check our calendar.