Introducing Annie

Hi everyone! I'm Annie!

I'm Talia's girlfriend, and I will be running this blog while she's away at a Spanish immersion program at the Middlebury Language Schools this summer. She's written a bunch of material that we'll be posting over the course of the summer, but I'm also going to be writing some guest posts of my own. (My guest posts will be on Tuesdays, and Talia's prewritten posts will be on Fridays.) Since you'll be seeing a lot of me here in the coming weeks, I figured I should introduce myself.

Since this is mostly an academic blog, I guess I'll start with my academic background. Like Talia, I'm a linguistics student. Specifically, I'm a master's student in computational linguistics, the subfield of linguistics that overlaps with computer science. I have also studied biology, with a focus in ecology. In addition to my "official" studies, I'm fascinated by history, anthropology, and philosophy, and read as much about them as I can, even though I haven't studied them formally. Outside of my academic life, I enjoy playing music, drawing, cooking, handcrafts like knitting and sewing, and any activity that lets me get outdoors and explore nature.

In keeping with the theme of this blog, I'm going to be mostly posting about language, though I'll probably take that in a whole bunch of different directions. Some topics that I will try to explore here include: the relationship between language, cognition, and culture; how signs and symbols work and how they show up in more parts of our lives than we realize; the implications of computer science and cybernetics for our understanding of language and thought (and vice versa); the historical origins of concepts we use today; the meaning of meaning; thoughts about thoughts; and thoughts about thoughts about thoughts. (I considered including thoughts about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts, but going up more than three levels of recursion is how you end up with your pants on the other side of the continent.)

If you want to find me elsewhere, I'm on tumblr at witandmirth.tumblr.com, though I don't post super often. I'm also planning to start a proper blog of my own, for writing that's too long and in-depth to go on my tumblr but not on-topic for this blog, and I'll probably post a link to it here when I do.

I think that about wraps up the introductory stuff. You'll be hearing more from me soon!

- Annie