Wanna keep updated on new exciting research? - filter mailinglists

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If you wanna keep updated on new exciting research there's several things you can do. And it's not that hard, and if you balance it and filter the feed correctly you won't get swamped.

You can subscribe to certain blogs, tumblrs and twitter feeds of particular linguists or institutions. I'll create a list of suggestions soon. You can also subscribe to people on academia or find RSS feeds of departments or other research institutions.

However, one of the easiest ways to keep track are mailing lists. Linguist List is a non-profit organisation that among other things gathers a lot of interesting mailinglists, you can browse them all here. You can set it to giving you digests instead of everything all the time. The most interesting list is probably "lingtyp" (according to me that is), but you gotta be a member of Association of Linguistic Typology to get in there.

Linguist List also keeps two general lists, LINGUIST and LINGLITE. These are freely available and if you're keen on knowing what's going on in the field you should definitely subscribe.

Now, for a word of advice. Some of these mailing lists are not very active at all, some are very active. The LINGUIST list is one of the main outlets for information about conference calls, new books being released, job positions, reviews of publications etc in the field of linguistics. LINGUIST has labels ("jobs", "calls", "books" etc) that will help you categorise posts quickly. Now, if you get all of that into your inbox you are going to get swamped, and fast! That's why you need to get some filters into your inbox. I don't know what email client you have, but most have some sort of way of prioritising emails using your contacts and filter terms. So, figure out how that work and start setting some filters. Create new filters as soon as you find something that seems relevant, weed out those that are over-generating uninteresting messages.

I've got filters on:

  • "pidgin" 
  • "creole" 
  • "nijmegen"
  • "reduplication"
  • "ulrike mosel"
  • "sign language typology"
  • "haspelmath"
  • "david gil"
  • "negation"
  • "harald hammarström"
  • "leipzig"
  • "samoan"
  • "samoa" 
  • "mpi nijmegen"
  • "max planck"
  • "glottolog"
  • "tirailleur"
  • "centre for language studies radboud"
  • "nordhoff"
  • "african languages"
  • "dissertation "grammar of""
  • "univeristy of manitoba"
  • "stockholm univeristy"
  • "östen dahl"
  • "parkvall"
  • "quantitative linguistics" 

to name a couple. Needless to say you need to keep them narrow enough to not get swamped, again :).

Reading those filter terms probably gives you a good idea of my research interests actually, now that I see them all listed that way. What are you filter words? If you don't have any, what do you think they'd be if you had them? I'm very curious ^^! Tell us!

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