2013: an eventful SLICE year

It began full of expectations and good spirits, which were cruelly defrauded in March: Our HERA application came out among the 31 applications out of some 600 that at the end of the evaluation process was declared fundable – but then the good spirits were hit hard as no money was found for us!

In April, votre vieux rédacteur learned that SLICE engagement can hit hard also in a physical sense when he fell in the stairs down to the metro station Islands Brygge (which many of you will know, just outside of Copenhagen University at Amager) and broke his shoulder – on the way to the airport and a flight that should bring him to a SLICE-related seminar with the Bergen group. This seminar in Bergen was held in June instead.

In May some of us assembled for a workshop in Copenhagen to cooperate about applications for Marie Curie fellowships – which led to a very strong application by Christoph Purschke for SLICE investigations in Austria. Alas, its fate just recently turned out to repeat the HERA story: We first learned that Christoph’s score was higher than the cut off score had ever been in previous years, so expectations were really high for a week or so – until we learned that this year the cut off score had risen beyond anyone’s imagination. (I had been looking forward to announce Christoph’s post.doc. position as the good December news.)

Many of us have met during the year at various conferences, often as participants in workshops or thematic panels organized around SLICE-related topics: SCL Reykjavík in May, ICLaVE Trondheim in June, ICL Geneva in July, IPrA New Dehli in September, LARM Copenhagen in November (see report from Jacob at the end of this newsletter). There has probably been others.

In November, advances in Lithuanian work in both the experimental strand and the media strand were presented and discussed at a meeting in Copenhagen including Loreta and Giedrius (Lithuania), Frans, Jacob and Tore (Denmark).

And… 2013 was the year when we finally - launched a SLICE website (in September) ... https://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/slice/. - published SLICE volume 2 (should be on its way from the printer any day now ) ... contents list reproduced in the End of October News (all previous Newsletters are uploaded in an archive on the website).

Marie Curie 2014

Same procedure as last year. So, in case a 2-year post.doc. position in Copenhagen is something you would consider applying for, please send me a mail and announce your interest before January 10. The workshop is planned to take place in Copenhagen in Mid-May. Deadline for the application is September 11 (!). You can read more about the MC program here: http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/about-mca/actions/ief/index_en.htm

Media strand news: Round Table (Copenhagen June 12-13, 2014)

Nikolas Coupland, Jacob Thøgersen and Janus Mortensen are organising a small Round Table meeting hosted by the Department for Scandinavian Research at Copenhagen University, 12-13 June 2014, on the theme of ‘Language, Style and Broadcast Media’.

The Round Table will bring together some leading international scholars with very diverse interests, overlapping with those of the SLICE media strand.

We have therefore reserved a few places at the event for media strand members of SLICE. If you are interested in filling one of these places (no administration fee, but you would have to cover your own travel and accommodation expenses), please send a message to Janus at jamo@ruc.dk.

LARM conference (Copenhagen November 14-15, 2013)

14 November, during the conference “LARM 2013: Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media, Cultural Memory”, Slice’ers from Lithuania (Giedrius and Loreta) and Denmark (Jacob), together with colleagues from the Netherlands (Leonie Cornips, Irene Stengs and Lotte Thissen) met in a themed panel to discuss “Challenging the homogeneity of ’media language’”.

Jacob discussed “Official norms and community norms in the language of broadcast news”. He looked at “prohibited” pronunciation phenomena in news readings and asked the question: “If they say it’s wrong, why is it spreading?”

Loreta & Ramune also looked at official prescriptivism against diachronic changes, here in Lithuanian broadcast media and addressed the question why some features have high salience and some have none, and why some things are still considered “wrong”, while others are being mucked as features only used by language prescriptivists.

Giedrius looked at “The use of non-standard lexis on air: five decades of changes and challenges” and asked the question why lexis which is officially prohibited (journalists are potentially fined for using it) is growing in use. Of particular interest to both of the Lithuanian presentations was the period in the early-mid 90s when Lithuania gained independence and new rules for government, media styles, forms of address etc. etc. were negotiated.

Leonie and her colleagues discussed stylization of dialects in Limbourg. Their case was the translation and enactment of Harry Potter into Limbourgian dialects and the stereotypes which are revealed when a character with certain traits are assigned a dialect: “why does the Minister of Magic speak the Maastricht variety? Which variety is most appropriate for (the evil character) Voldemort?”

At the conference but outside of this particular panel, Laima Nevinskaite in her paper “Archives and historical change. Reflections on the experience of developing broadcast media corpus from the Soviet period and beyond” asked some very pertinent questions regarding access to media data, selection and preservation strategies of the archives and some very profound questions as to the comparability of media genres across time. Typically when investigating language change we want to keep genre and/or style constant. With what right can we claim that a talkshow of the 70s is comparable to a talkshow of the 2000s? The problem of course is universal but becomes very visible in a country like Lithuania which to some extent re-invented its media genres in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The keynote presentations from the conference (by Michele Hilmes, Karin Bijsterveld, Lev Manovich and David Hendy) are available online. The papers from the parallel sessions, unfortunately, are not. http://larm.blogs.ku.dk/2013/12/11/larm-conference-keynote-presentations