[Linganth] AAA submission deadline approaches

[Judy Pine]

Dear fellow linguistic anthropologists,

I am very pleased to see all of the activity on this listserv as folks organize sessions for the upcoming AAA meeting in Denver.  I heartily encourage this sort of organizing, both on the listserv and via any other useful means - the social networking tools we have available to us are astonishing to me, especially when I recall what things were like back in the days of honest to goodness card catalogues and an unmarked category "mail" delivered by the USPS.

As you create and flesh out your sessions, please keep a weather eye on the calendar, and be absolutely sure that everyone in the session has registered and submitted their material by the April 15th deadline.  Once that window closes the folks at AAA "clean up" the submissions by deleting everything that isn't associated with a paid up registration, and I never get to see it.

If you are considering submitting individually, please consider the poster option, either as a primary option or as an alternative.  Posters can be excellent ways to get feedback on your work, and offer AV options that are harder to accomplish in a presentation.  I can envision, for example, having several headsets set up so that folks can listen to extended chunks of your data while reading your handout, perhaps having a loop of video running to watch while listening.  Your audience can then develop useful questions and feedback which you can use as you move towards publishing, or thesis defense, or further research.

Keep in mind, as well, that the SLA Program Committee must submit all papers to AAA as part of panels.  AAA does not accept individual papers.  This means that my committee and I MUST group all individually submitted papers into panels before submitting them on to AAA.  We work hard to develop strong, coherent panels, with papers which make sense together.  It is conceivable, however, that a very good paper may have nothing at all in common with any other submission.  Since panels are all ranked according to their strength, a panel of unrelated papers would necessarily be ranked below internally coherent panels.   When I submit my panels, in rank order, to AAA, the folks at AAA then decide how many panels we at SLA will get.  They apply their number to our list, and cut off the lower ranked panels.

Connecting your panel to the overall theme of the conference, or to one of the many discourses that are current in our field, are good ways to improve panel strength.  Including voices from a variety of perspectives within your theme is also a strong point.  Given past experience, I anticipate that you will be competing in a field full of really excellent and interesting work, which makes ranking a serious challenge for us.  As my grad advisor always says, you cannot get something for which you do not apply.

I look forward to reading all of your submissions, and being once again reminded of what a lot of very interesting and meaningful work we do!

Your SLA Program Committee Chair,

-          Judy Pine

Judith M.S. Pine
Assoc. Professor
Dept of Anthropology
Western Washington University

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