LINGUIST List: Your First Student Editor

Wed Apr 5 19:31:47 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List Special Issue: Your First Student Editor

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U. <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org)
        Sheila Dooley, U. of Arizona 
        Terry Langendoen, U. of Arizona 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

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The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.
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-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006
From: linguist < linguist at linguistlist.org >
Subject: LINGUIST List: Dr. Ljuba Veselinova on Her Return to LINGUIST 

Dear subscribers,

I would like to start with a long overdue THANK YOU! The donations of
many of you supported me when I was an MA student and LINGUIST List
editor from 1994 through 1997. Thanks to your generosity I was able to
enter the world of UNIX and the world wide web, work in an exciting
and ever changing environment such as the LINGUIST List , complete a
master's degree and finally, see a country that had long been
completely inaccessible for me. A big and hearty THANKS goes to all of
you!

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I was born and raised in
Sofia, Bulgaria. As a child I traveled regularly to Algeria where my
parents worked for a long time. French was the first foreign language
I came to speak. English followed somewhat later after much painful,
and my parents would add, expensive, tutoring. I started college in
Sofia as an English and French major, but soon decided that those
languages were way too common, in that they were spoken by way too
many people. Scandinavia appeared satisfactorily exotic to me, so I
took Swedish more or less due to sheer accident. After a couple of
scholarships to Sweden, I ended up settling down there. Once in
Stockholm, I discovered that linguistics can give me access to many
more "exotic" languages that I could possibly ever attempt to learn
and even suggest ways for explaining them. After completing my BA in
linguistics in Stockholm, the strong nudge of a friend and my growing
interest in technology made me apply for the LINGUIST List fellowship
when it was announced for the first time. And lo and behold, I found
myself in the Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor area in Michigan.

I doubt that the LINGUIST List moderators, Helen and Anthony Aristar,
knew what they were getting into when they initiated the fellowship
and brought a foreigner such as myself to the US. With me they found
themselves fulfilling multiple roles: they acted surrogate parents,
boarding school managers, driving school coaches, university
professors, and mentors in a very general, and I cannot emphasize this
strongly enough, very generous way. Back then, LINGUIST List was at
the very initial stages of its development, but I think anyone would
agree that even at that stage, the enterprise was already demanding a
rather high toll for its smooth running.

In 1994, LINGUIST List was a distributed listserv-based mailing list
moderated with great care and sparse funding. The listserv computer
was in Texas A & M and we were connecting to it via a simple telnet
session. All work was done directly at the command prompt in an UNIX
environment, and learning my first UNIX commands made me feel like a
geek. The daily routine consisted of sorting mail, editing messages,
composing issues and mailing them out, all of this spiced up with a
lot of correspondence in between. While these tasks may sound mundane
at first, each and every one of them was actually fascinating in its
own way. Through mail and correspondence, I came into direct contact
with most (if not all) authors of the hefty books on my reading lists.
Having to edit their messages was scary and enthralling at the same
time.  Looking back at those days, I now can see that only ignorance
allowed me to ask someone whose textbook I was currently reading to
please, please change the wording of their message, for politeness
purposes. But apart from the direct contact with linguists, there was
another awe-inspiring aspect of the work: namely the fact that the
messages I put together were instantly being distributed to a very
large number of people, who in many cases knew a lot more about the
issues I was posting on.

Sometime in early 1995, we heard that somewhere on the internet there
was something called hypertext transfer protocol and a mysterious
language, HTML, associated with it. We were told it wasn't hard to
learn and indeed, it turned out not be. So the first LINGUIST List
website site was created but back then its functions were limited
which is not surprising given the state of art of the world wide web.

As more and more people were finding their way to LINGUIST List, and
the amount of accumulated information (conferences announcements,
dissertation abstracts, book ads, student support ads, job
announcements, summaries of discussions, I hardly need to enumerate
all those here) was outgrowing manageable limits, it became apparent
that for all of it to be useful and accessible to linguistic
community, it had to be searchable. A grant proposal was submitted to
the National Science Foundation (NSF) and at the time when I was
leaving in 1997, the proposal had been funded for a year and work on
it was in progress. LINGUIST List was still supporting one student
based on subscriber's donations.

In 2006, only 9 years later, LINGUIST List supports 25 students at 3
different universities. As the NSF funded EMELD project draws to an
end, two other large scale projects are about to start. In addition to
being information collector and disseminator, LINGUIST List is now
developing tools for field linguists, housing metadata for language
archives and working on search tools for these archives and databases.
The students who work on LINGUIST List learn database design, SQL and
ColdFusion. They are wizards at dynamic HTML and before long they will
be learning various applications of geographical information systems
in linguistics. They are living personifications of enthusiasm and
when the need arises (which does happen), they will work day and night
to get messages posted on time, complete a project or meet a deadline.
It is a pleasure to walk into a populated LINGUIST List meeting where
so much is going on and everyone has something to report.

Dear subscribers, your contributions are funding an extremely reliable
discussion forum with high standards, a truly unique searchable data
repository for linguistics and an evolving school for language
technology. Please help all of this to continue. LINGUIST List is by
now an essential tool for linguistic research and its students need
you!

Thanks for reading this far. And thanks again for supporting me
through a degree and indirectly, for the time I was able to spend in a
truly awesome country!

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Helen and Anthony
for the affection and care they have shown to me, and for their
limitless devotion to the profession without which neither LINGUIST
List, nor its achievements would have been where they are. In
contributing, you will help expanding their vision even further.

Sincerely yours,

Ljuba

-------------------------Message 2 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006
From:  linguist < linguist at linguistlist.org >
Subject: More Fund Drive Letters

Below are other Fund Drive letters you might have missed.

Five: Years at LINGUIST 
Michael Appleby on Watching LINGUIST Grow

http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1000.html

Time: For a Challenge 
The Grad School Challenge

http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1003.html

Applause: Give Yourselves Some 
Halfway To Our Goal!

http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1004.html

You: Can Get What You Need 
Editor Meredith Valant on Finding Her Place

http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1015.html

-------------------------Message 3 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006
From:  linguist < linguist at linguistlist.org >
Subject: How to donate...

This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $52,932. This money will go
to help keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors
for the coming year.

There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!

You can donate right now using our secure credit card form.

Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later.

For all information on donating and pledging, including information on
how to donate by check, money order, or wire transfer, please visit:

http://linguistlist.org/donate.html

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University
and as such can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is
a registered 501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is
38-6005986. These donations can be offset against your federal and
sometimes your state tax return (U.S. tax payers only). For more
information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact your financial advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will
match any gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this
entails your contacting your human resources department and sending us
a form that the EMU Foundation fills in and returns to your
employer. This is generally a simple administrative procedure that
doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without costing you an
extra penny. Please take a moment to check if your company operates
such a program.

Note: the donors' names are appended to every fund drive message sent
to the main list. You can also see the list of all donors by clicking
here:

http://linguistlist.org/donation/contributors2006.html

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!