April 30, 2014
Hi all,
Just wanted to report back on our USA-SEF booth, which was a rousing success! Over 325,000
people came to the fair, and we had lines and crowds at our booth for most of Saturday and
Sunday. I fully admit to having been skeptical about the logistics and desire of people to have
their vowels measured, but it was an extremely popular activity (and we had a great deal of fun
when we were able to pull a Henry Higgins on those pesky Canadians with their crazy BOOT
vowel fronting.)
Our intern, Sara, had the bright idea at the 11th hour to reframe the booth as being about
accents: we titled the poster “Do You Have An Accent?” the powerpoint “How well can you
hear accents?” and the vowel measurement station as “See what your accent looks like.” This
of course generated lots of interest, as people were dragging their family members over to see
who had an accent (we joked that we should’ve renamed the booth “Yes, your
dad/mom/spouse DOES have an accent”) and created a great jumping off point for talking
about how linguists are descriptivist and then showing what kinds of things we do.
We had 8 student volunteers from Maryland and Georgetown, along with myself and the
LSA intern, Sara McVeigh, staff the booth. We wound up using the three modules in a slightly
different order than expected: the poster served more as backup to the other two activities
when people wanted to understand how we could make those sorts of judgment calls and
measurements. Most people were just interested in the vowel shifts powerpoint, which was
fine, but for a good part of Saturday and Sunday we had a line for people to have their vowels
measured.
I think these materials could be easily re-used, and will be happy to re-share them: I’ve
attached both the finished PowerPoint and Dennis’s vowel plot excel sheets (altered slightly to
remove some of the IPA and to make it impossible to edit the baseline measurements). I’ve also
attached some photos of the event; we’ll share more on Facebook.
The things we probably could’ve done differently: it would’ve been fun to have a printer
to print out the vowel plots, and probably some edits to the Excel spreadsheet to make input
easier would help. Also because we themed the booth somewhat late, I very much regretted
not having stickers that said “YES! I have an accent” to hand out. But overall, it was very fun and
very well-received.
Thank you to all for your hard work in making this happen. This turned out to be a really
great event, and really was a good spotlight for the LSA and for the field more generally.
All best,
Jessi
PS One note about setup was that we got a large screen to do the Powerpoint, and I think that
made a good deal of difference.