last week i locked myself in my office and read and read and read and read. it was great! i have said earlier that blogging regularly has changed the way i read. i tend to read in short bursts and found it much more difficult to concentrate. i had to re-learn the art of academic [...]

tomorrow is the seminar i have been getting ready for all week. and with it, i have coined a new term. i don’t like the term blogosphere. it is not at all descriptive of the actually patterns of communities of bloggers. i have re-dubbed for tomorrow, as well as in the paper, the term blogosphere to [...]

i like the phrase, ‘breathtaking highs’ and it is very descriptive of  the kind of week i have had so far (and it is only wednesday, sigh). but even though there was a bit of disappointment mixed in with my high, it has still been an exciting and fulfilling ride.
on the academic front, i have had [...]

i am still drinking in the theories put forth by Penelope Eckert  in her book, Linguistic Variation As Social Practice, and have listed and/or summarized a few below:

No community exists in a vacuum and it is the individual speaker that brings life to language.
Speaker as constituting rather than representing social categories
The ’social meaning [...]

i have been floundering for a while now, trying to fit what i am seeing in weblog communities into the linguistic model i had previously chosen…and i tried, and i read, and i was just *not* making the connections! when i started working with lilia and anjo, i began to dabble in sociolinguistic theories, but [...]

another really interesting young researcher here at Umeå University has begun blogging! i know him and am even in a net-life group with him, but did not realize how much our work has in common! so far *all* his posts have caught my attention and i am looking forward to reading more! welcome daniel!

last night I watched 5 minutes of Hannibal, which I have seen before, and even though I did not see the ‘feeding him his own brain scene’ last night, I still dreamt about it. i woke up all spastic and scared and whined out into the darkness…’ohhh, *really* bad nightmare. really really bad’. and now [...]

the last couple of weeks have been so interesting and very beneficial, but i have not had a lot of time to work on my thesis – my goal this term is to finish the first chapter. so much has changed in my research plan and my current focus is on sociolinguistics: linguistic change and [...]