An annual appeal
Forwarded from the American Dialect Society mailing list yesterday, a
message from
Grant Barrett:
Linguist List is currently hosting its
annual fund drive. The organization's needs are modest and the return
on your money is significant. (
link)
If you have used its list archives, job postings, or other services
over the last year, I would like to encourage you to contribute. I
believe it's important that we recognize those good parts of the
Internet and it is our personal duty to keep them alive.
If you work for an institution, please consider making a contribution
of a size proportional to your organization's use of or appreciation
for Linguist List.
Linguist List provides a (moderated) discussion forum, job listings,
book announcements and reviews, calls for papers and conference
programs, links to resources of many kinds on language and linguistics,
and the Ask a Linguist service. It also hosts over a hundred
linguistics-related lists, and it archives many of them (including
ADS-L). All for free. It's the sort of operation that
actually requires a staff (students who receive fellowships), which
means that it needs real money.
If you're unfamiliar with Linguist List, check out the site.
There's a lot there.
When you contribute to the fund, you can have your contribution
credited to an academic institution, in the Grad School
Challenge. The winning institution gets glory and some academic
booty.
Unlike Grant, I have some connection to Linguist List: I'm an Advisor
to the list, and this year I'm one of the featured Linguists of the Day
(this year called Ringmasters -- there's a circus theme), along with
William Labov, Peter Trudgill, Language Log's own Barbara Partee,
Steven Pinker,
Katarzyna
Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, and
Lenore
Grenoble. (Geoff Pullum was one of the featured linguists
last year.) We each wrote up the story of how we got into
linguistics, and these are being posted at intervals during the fund
drive. (And now you can nominate a Linguist of the Day for 2009.)
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 22, 2008 12:50 PM