Author: alejna

long shadows

election-day-shadowsA year ago today was an intensely emotional day. At this moment, I can’t recall any other comparable days in my life, wherein I felt both joy and despair so close together. The intensity of the emotions I felt that day about public events easily rival any that I have felt with respect to events in my own personal life.

I have thought back many times this past year that I wish I could have bottled the giddiness I felt when I cast my vote, excited about my participation in the historic occasion of electing the first woman president of the United States. I’ve wished that I could tap back into that momentarily unfettered optimism that kept a genuine smile on my face as I stood outside our town’s polling place, holding signs for both local and national candidates, and waving cheerfully at all who passed.

We all know how things turned out that evening. And that day has cast a long shadow across the past year for me. Again, there are few events that have transpired in my lifetime that have so deeply affected me. Not a day has gone by this past year that I have not given my thoughts, and often my time and energy, in big ways and small, into addressing the results of that day.

unexpected grace

paper-curl

It’s amazing to me how sometimes something trivial and ordinary can appear both beautiful and remarkable, given the right set of circumstances. This little scrap of paper, torn from some packaging and left on a table, caught the afternoon light coming in from the window to reveal in its shadow an unexpectedly elegant spiral.

leaf lines

When it’s after 11, and you really need to get to sleep, you struggle to come up with what to post for your daily post. You’ve toyed around with all kinds of post ideas during the day, but then you’ve run out of both time and energy. Ultimately, you decide once more to post a bunch of photos of leaves. In this case the leaves in the photos had all caught your eye for their striking pattern of lines, with veins contrasting with the body of the leaf. And also in this case you are really me. And both you and I should really get to sleep.

lily pods

lily-seed-pods

These seed pods caught my eye on my walk this morning. I believe that they are lily seed pods. I find it rather striking how lacy the pod casings are. They look so delicate and fragile. It’s hard to imagine both that these pods would have been fresh and green only a few weeks ago, and that these filigreed pods and their rather brittle-looking stems were strong enough to have weathered a fairly severe wind storm only a week ago.

 

 

a walk in the woods

While my daughter was off on a hike of her own with friends, my son and I headed out for a walk in some woods in a neighboring town. We both enjoyed the fresh fall air, and I especially enjoyed the glow of the late afternoon light.

various variegated leaves

I did promise leaf photos. Here are several leaves that caught my eye for their variety of color and pattern.

In my part of New England, this fall has been a strange one, foliage-wise. Well, weather-wise, which affects the foliage. First, the cool weather of fall was late to kick in, and we only had our fist chilly nights pretty late into October, which meant that most of the leaves stayed green up to that point. When those cold nights hit, we had a sudden dramatic change to the warm side of the spectrum. Then we were hit by a big storm a couple of weeks later, with high winds that pretty well cleared the trees of leaves. As one friend put it, we had a “pop and drop” foliage season.

(not quite) back in the swing of things

swing chain, triangle

It’s apparently hard for me to get back into the swing of posting daily.

swing

But I won’t let a day of failure keep be from my goals. I’ll climb back up on that swing, and start kicking my legs again.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Even if it means posting a bunch of photos that I took years ago (and may well have posted here years ago).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Before you know it, I’ll get into the rhythm of it, and feel the breeze in my hair. (Blog posts cause a bit of wind, don’t they? Sometimes they may, at least, be full of hot air.)

Not dead yet

x-eyed-pumpkin

Here it is, November 1st, and I haven’t posted since April. Some have wondered if the blog (at least this one) is good and dead. However, I’m willing to declare that this blog is not dead yet.

Since I started this blog over 10 years ago, I have participated in some sort of daily posting every November. Here’s to (at least) one more go. (Expect a high percentage of leaf photos, musings about the rapid passage of time, and filler text.)

Speaking out for Science

speaking-waveform
Coming up this Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will join voices for the March for Science. (The main March will be in Washington, DC, and there are 512 satellite marches planned. I’ll be going to the Boston one.)

Soon after I heard about the march, I not only planned to go, but started working on a design for a t-shirt and sign. As I am a linguist, I wanted to represent speech and language sciences. I made a recording of myself saying my slogan, “speaking out for science,” and put together a graphic with the (orthographic) text, a waveform, and a phonetic transcription in IPA. I put up a draft of my design on Facebook, and got some feedback from other linguists on my transcription. I made a new recording with some clearer articulation, and put up a new image and transcription. I finalized a couple versions of my design (one with a spectrogram), and set up a storefront on TeePublic (an online t-shirt store), and lo and behold, several people ordered shirts!

speaking-spectrogram

A couple of weeks or so later, a (linguist) friend of mine shared a photo of herself in her new shirt. There was lots of gratifying positive feedback, but also a few other (linguist) friends of hers said things like “that’s not how I’d say that,” as well as “that’s not how I’d transcribe that!” There was much back and forth about both articulation and use of diacritics. (Mostly centered around the release of stop consonants, if you want to know the nitty gritty.)

While I admittedly at first felt a bit deflated to have the design I’d made for fun get feedback that felt harsher than what I’ve seen from anonymous reviewers on a conference abstract, I realized that there was an opening for a new variation on the design. Because this is what scientists do. We discuss our methods and our data with our peers, and we revise accordingly.

speaking-multispeaker

So I made some revisions. Whereas the possible variation in saying a simple 4-word phrase at first seemed like an obstacle to get around in choosing a representative production to use for my design, I realized that it was an opportunity for a new design to reflect the variation itself. And so I asked my friends and those friends of friends who’d been part of the discussion to submit recordings of themselves saying the phrase, with the option of sending their own transcription. My new design has 7 different productions of the phrase “speaking out for science,” along with a new sub-slogan: “No matter how you say it, science matters.”
speaking-multilingual

And I had another idea for a design to include more languages. I especially wanted to include a non-spoken language. I consulted with a Deaf friend on how best to represent the word science in ASL (American Sign Language). With her guidance, I consulted a few references (including video), and drew and adjusted a diagram to represent the word. I also included 26 other languages, in addition to English. (And I had to consult others again for help with a few of the languages with non-Roman script, including one friend in Abu Dhabi, and another in Bangladesh.)

And so it is that I have 4 different design variations. I have put together some files that are available for downloading and printing, free for personal use, should anyone else want to use them. (I’m planning on making a couple of two-sided signs, each with 2 of the different designs.) Variations of the designs are also available on t-shirts and on some other stuff on TeePublic.

Below are the files, formatted for printing on 18″x 24″ (but scaleable). The png files have a transparent background. Images were created using Praat and Illustrator.

  • Speaking out for Science: Single speaker waveform [pdf png]
  • Speaking out for Science: Single speaker with spectrogram [pdf png ]
  • Speaking out for Science: multi-speaker [pdf png]
  • Speaking out for Science: multilingual [pdf png ]

Let me know if you decide to use one of my signs. And let me know if you have any suggestions for future versions! (Help me get more voices and more languages. For science!) You can always email me at alejna99 “at” gmail.com.

Edited 4/18/2017: I have updated the pdf and png files to hopefully fix font issues that may come up on different computers. Please do let me know if you run into problems with any of the files!