30.1483, Staff Letter: Peace Han

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1483. Thu Apr 04 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1483, Staff Letter: Peace Han

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

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Editor for this issue: Peace Han <peace at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2019 12:17:25
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Staff Letter: Peace Han

 
Dear LINGUIST List Subscribers,

This is Peace Han, the systems administrator and one of the student
programmers here at the LINGUIST List. I hope this message finds all of you
well and ready to greet the spring! It’s still a little chilly here in
Bloomington, Indiana, but the flower buds have finally begun to bloom and all
of us at the LINGUIST List are eagerly awaiting warmer weather.

In case you couldn’t tell by the barrage of fund drive messages being sent
your way, we are currently running our annual LINGUIST List Fund Drive! As my
colleagues and fellow graduate assistants have mentioned before me, all of us
are indebted to you, our readers, for this opportunity to participate in and
serve the global linguistic community. The LINGUIST List has been for all of
us a place for personal and academic growth, as it has been for numerous
linguistics students before us over the past 29 years and counting.

Working as the system administrator and programmer for the LINGUIST List has
given me some interesting insight into the development of code and coding
styles over the years. Because much of the code running the current site was
first written many years ago at the dawn of the internet era, and because the
LINGUIST List has changed and adapted so much to incorporate new technologies,
idiosyncrasies and outdated conventions sometimes still persist in the code.
It is always an adventure trying to track down exactly why certain features
were written in one way rather than another, and I am often reminded of
linguistic fieldwork as I read, write and interpret the legacy of code
inherited from student programmers  who worked on this website and its various
features before me. Still, the natural language comments left in the code by
my predecessors are much more helpful to me than code language, reminding me
that we have a long way to go before computers and AI can catch up to natural
human language. This is why I believe the work we linguists do is so valuable,
and why I am honored to be able to contribute to this field through the
LINGUIST List and through my studies.

Outside of my job at the LINGUIST List, I am a student at Indiana University
in the Computational Linguistics, joint BS/MS program, with a dual degree in
Psychology. The Linguistics department at IU and the LINGUIST List both have
been wonderful in supporting me throughout my academic career at IU, and I
would not be able to complete the 5-year program without your support. I and
all of my fellow student graduate assistants working at the LINGUIST List are
grateful for the chance to support and give back to the linguistics community
while also completing our studies. 

So once again, thank you for your continued support of the LINGUIST List! If
you think the LINGUIST List and the various services it offers are valuable,
as all of us at LL do, or if you are a believer of free and open communication
within the field of linguistics (or if you simply want to stop having to exit
out of the fund drive page to reach our site), please donate here. We are all
grateful for your support!

Best,
Peace Han
Systems Administrator | Programmer
The LINGUIST List







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