Advertising Geraldine

About two weeks ago, someone from the library contacted me about advertising my talk for the library in November. As the talk is connected to the scholarship that the library gave me, I had to think carefully about how to advertise Geraldine. I finally got around to writing an abstract and title yesterday, but the library wanted a picture as well.

At first, the title and abstract were a challenge. Knowing that I have to present my dissertation research to a group of non-linguists, I had to come up with something that sounds both impressive and comprehensible. Geraldine has an official title, and comming up with it was a feat in itself. Early on while reading articles and book chapters for Geraldine, I decided to never name anything with a title that required a colon. For some reason, it is a growing trend in academia to name publications in the following manner:

Something catchy and/or funny goes here: this is where it says what your research is really about

The part before the colon serves the purpose of making researchers feel better about their work (as if having a witty title will make more people read the paper). The second part of the title is much more dull, but it gets to the point. It is the only part that interests the people deciding whether or not to read the article. Half annoyed with having to type long titles into my bibliography and half not wanting to join in as a trendy title groupie, I named Geraldine wisely and have had a difficult time coming up with variations for other presentations that don't sound exactly the same. No one wants to read 10+ titles on a CV that only differ from eachother by one or two words.

The library employee sent me example posters from past presenters and scholarship winners. Some of the abstracts sounded overly boastful "award winning dissertation research", "top doctoral scholar of the university" and the like. I suppose that I did win an award for Geraldine and I had to be the top applicant to do so, but I don't need that advertised with my face attached to it. I wrote what I hope is a modest abstract that gets straight to the point but is interesting enough to attract a diverse audience.

The picture requirement was more fun. It seems that I don't have a wide range of serious pictures of myself as a scholar. I entertained myself at the end of my work day today with hubby's camera. Below are a few highlights, as well as a few examples of me on a typical work day.



Typical day teaching one of my classes

  

Archiving really important stuff



Conducting linguistic experiments

  

Saving bunnies and guinea pigs from weird experiments





Presenting at conferences (notice no one is sleeping)

 

  



Collecting Data

  





What I really do all day long



More of what I really do all day long

What I usually wish I were doing instead

 

And finally the picture that I actually submitted: