Knitting as the non-smoker's pipe-smoking

I tweeted one day:


"I should take up knitting! It's like the non-smoker's version of pipe smoking. I'll sit in my armchair and knit and think."


And unlike a lot of such things I tweet, I actually did take up knitting, much to my grandmother's delight. Well I say delight; she keeps saying "you must be able to knit" then fixing my dropped stitches and teaching me to purl. There are three advantages: 1) it doesn't require much concentration; 2) it's not a computer; 3) I can quite happily suck at it.


1) It doesn't require much concentration

Of course this wasn't the case at first but eventually I achieved my lofty dream of sitting in an armchair, knitting and thinking deep thoughts. I'm sure there are many proverbs and literary quotes referring to busy hands which totally escape me at the moment. This is nothing new I've discovered and I don't claim that it is. I'm one of those people who sometimes concentrates better with music - it's like I need to distract part of my brain so the rest of it can get on and do stuff.


2) It's not a computer

With my iPhone as my default go-to for queues, bus trips and distractions, it's nice to not activate whatever part of the brain responds to bright lights, to not risk distraction by numerous bells, chimes and whistles signalling who-knows-what. And it's nice to have something tangible at the end of it, the very existence of which tracks the passing of time. Because I can spend hours on the computer or iPhone and everything would reset at the end. But I can't be stuffed knitting that long and I can't knit more than a few rows before I'm satisfied and/or inspired to do something else. Maybe this is yet a budding addiction, though. Either which way, it is very clear that the rows have been knitted, that the scarf is growing and that time has passed.

3) I can quite happily suck at it

To my grandmother's perplexion, I take great pleasure in how bad I am at it; it seems appropriate to have holes and pulled threads and unevenness and unintentionally gained stitches. I'm not knitting to be a knitter, and as I have a friend whose PhD in Art is knitting I definitely have a sense of perspective on this. I'm calling it my "legitimation scarf" as I started it listening to seminars on Legitimation Code Theory, continued it writing my thesis which legitimates me as a researcher, and finally if I eventually finish it, it might, despite my earlier disavowel, make me a knitter by being the only piece of knitting I've ever finished in my life, in comparison to the half-dozen times between 5 and 22 that I took up knitting only to give up after a few inches, with a few more random balls of fancy wool I over-ambitiously bought.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Every presentation ever

I return to my theme of advocating non-coma-inducing presentations with this video. I'm ignoring the sale at the end, but it's got some good points. We all know when a presentation sucks. We don't all know when we suck at presenting. And we don't always know how to stop it sucking. But here's to greater awareness!

If Doctor Who was a linguist

People assume that language is a strict connection between object and name, between meaning and word, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... semioticky semanticky... stuff.

Trinocular perspective

"In terms of stratification, the book deals with lexicogrammar, the stratum of working. If we use the familiar metaphor of vertical space, as implied in the word 'stratum', the startum 'above' is the semantics, that 'below' is the phonology. We cannot expect to understand the grammar just by looking at i[t] from its own level; we also look into it 'from above' and 'from below', taking a trinocular perspective. But since the view from these different angles is often conflicting, the description will inevitably be a form of compromise. All lingusitic description involves such compromise; the difference between a systemic description and one in terms of traditional school grammar is that in the school grammars the compromise was random and unprincipled, whereas in a systemic grammar it is systematic and theoretically motivated. Being a 'functional grammar' means that priority is given to the view 'from above'; that is, grammar is seen as a resource for making meaning - it is a 'semanticky' kind of grammar. But the focus of attention is still on the grammar itself."

Halliday & Matthiessen 2004 An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd edition) p. 31

I choose to think of the trinocular perspective described above with this picture:

I'm writing a blogpost. This is quite clearly not redoing the analysis that I had already done on paper but can't find now. But sometimes you just need to write about something and put your head in order.

Thesiswhisperer asked on twitter recently for comebacks when people question the point of doing a PhD (and subsequently blogged about it). My mind was a little fuzzy and could only think of lengthy and thus un-tweetable responses until finally I replied:

"Until space travel is viable, a PhD is how we explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before"

When you're doing a PhD it doesn't hurt to tap into geek culture once in a while.

However one thing I am very thankful for is that people don't often question the validity of my research. I used to get nervous that performance-focussed jazz musicians would find it completely pointless, but every student I've spoken to is aware of the difficulty they face in writing. Even more broadly, students of other faculties and disciplines also understand the challenge of writing, that writing is important at university and so can respect my decision to research it. How they respond to my findings may be another thing; I had trouble once when a non-linguist audience was very content-focussed and felt I was missing aspects which I felt were unimportant for me as musicians are well able to recognise vocabulary differences between jazz and classical music without me pointing them out.

The question I find more difficult, partly because I'm still not confident of the answer myself, is what I will do after the PhD, and therefore what is the point in ME doing a PhD. Not having ever planned to do a research degree before I found myself accepted to one can lead to a few insecurities. Sometimes the question is "what does it get you", suggesting an almost materialistic view of education - only valued if you "get" some qualification or license to label yourself a profession, ignoring the skills and perspectives you gain. My dad is fond of saying that no education is ever wasted, though admittedly once in a while someone really puts that to the test. Once I found myself arguing more strongly than usual after being dismissed by an older, much distant relative (who I'd never met before) as an eternal student, as if it was merely an enthusiastic yet irrelevant interest to be good-humouredly indulged and which, to my disbelieving indignation, required a rich husband to support. Clearly I have to be earning lots of money before I'm considered independent. And even then...

Anyway, that was a forgotten, yet clearly bottled-up, detour.

There are many possibilities of what I theoretically could do after my PhD. I'm hoping and praying (while usually trying to avoid thinking about it) that an appropriate opportunity pops up at a suitable time and doesn't leave me penniless for too long after my scholarship runs out. I am resassured that my friend recently got a job which will hopefully give her the opportunity to apply her research. I wonder sometimes if my topic is too niche and doubt my abilities to be able to move beyond my little corner, but then smart people say nice things about me and I let myself relax a little.

But next time someone socially asks me what I'm going to do after my PhD I might respond with "join Starfleet", because it seems if nothing else, I must be qualified to "explore new worlds, seek out new life forms and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before"!

And in the meantime I'm going to make badges with "ASK ME IN JUNE". I'll make a whole range of them with every month to choose from then sell them to PhD, Masters students and pregnant women.

Research at Adelaide

In honour of Research Week at the University of Adelaide, I thought I would blog about the research happening in the Discipline of Linguistics. Without the strong research focus here, I would never have ended up doing a PhD or discovered how fascinating and exciting it can be, so in a way this is my tribute to those that have inspired me.

Dr Celine Chu's recent thesis is fascinating for combining multimodal analysis of children's picture books with classroom discourse analysis of an ESL classroom. She identified issues in the meanings constructed multimodally in the picture books which lead to confusion in the children's reading. She then looked at how the teacher talk scaffolds an understanding of these meanings. I really hope she gets the opportunity to introduce this information to pre-service teachers.

Dr Hiromi Teramoto examined classroom discourse in a New Arrivals Program classroom, and how the identity of a 'new arrival' is constructed.


Johanna Motteram is looking at IELTS - International English Language Testing System. Specifically she is focussing on what "appropriate tone" means in the high band descriptors for the writing task, as there doesn't seem to be any clear definition. Assessment is a very important area of research and IELTS is a very high status manifestation of this - a good score in IELTS changes lives through admission to universities as well as Australian citizenship. Identifying exactly what are the qualities of these valued texts are will help not only with helping people to pass the test and write better, but will inform how language acquisition is measured and assessed.


Dr John Walsh and Nayia Cominos are working on an ARC linkage grant sponsored project looking at the language of handover in the mental health system. Having worked in health care, and particularly having been involved in administrative tasks of creating more or less detailed handover sheets to facilitate fast but comprehensive handover between nursing staff at an aged care facility, I find this research fascinating and immensely important.

Margareta Rebelos is completing her thesis on raising her daughter bilingually in Slovak and English, continuing the proud tradition of linguists conducting research on their children.

Kateryna Katsman will be documenting Barossa German - the variety of German spoken by descendants of German settlers in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, a region well known for its wine production.

Naptsinee Vichaidit will be looking at the language spoken between Thai police officers and tourists in resort areas in Thailand.

I am less familiar with the research of Dr Rob Amery, Professor Peter Muhlhausler and Professor Gh'ilad Zuckerman who are focussed on endangered languages, language reclamation and aboriginal languages, but their work is tremendously important in preserving and restoring these languages. Prof Zuckerman can be seen here and here talking to Stephen Fry about modern Hebrew, or Israeli.

Other interesting research occurs in the Masters of Applied Linguistics coursework program. Some of my favourite topics include:
Meng Sun's work on Martian Language in China - a net-speak version of Chinese with alternative uses of characters used by youth and online communities to exclude outside understanding;
Napatsinee Vichaidit's examination of Thai subtitles of The Simpsons;
Tomoko Ikeda's explorations of the genre of ReadMes for video game mods;
Toshikazu Okawa's study of an international student learning the academic literacies associated with nursing during their studies;
Kumari Revindran's analysis of the representation of the population 'crisis' in Singapore;
Vanessa Tan's critical discourse analysis of National Day songs in Singapore.

There are far more people who have done interesting, thorough and fascinating research than I could include in a blogpost, but I wanted to mention just a few that I know about. If you would like to know more about any of these topics, let me know and I can put you in touch.

How a PhD is like Alice in Wonderland (slideshow)

How a PhD is like Alice in Wonderland

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