I’m very happy to share this update : my first “Amazon parody reviews” article has just been published in the online journal, Language@Internet!  I’ve been working on this topic ever since I finished writing my book about review language, two years ago. I’ve even given 3 or 4 conference talks about it since then.  But, for some reason, figuring out exactly the right angle to take has been a challenging and lengthy ordeal.  Nevertheless, once the writing finally got underway, I was lucky enough to have a couple of other related papers come out of the process.  So… if all goes well, a second article about narrative identities in parody reviews, and a book chapter comparing references to gender in legitimate versus parody reviews, should appear later — perhaps sometime in 2017.  Stay tuned!

I have one other piece of digital media to share.  Rather than writing final term papers this semester, my awesome undergraduate Language & Society students (these guys):worked on multi-phase, group video projects. They modeled their projects after a video made by Manchester University.  My main objectives were: 1) for students to gain an experiential understanding of the linguistic diversity of Tampa Bay (something that many folks at our university and in our area take for granted); 2) to interact with people whose experiences may be different from their own; 3) to demonstrate a few things that they learned from our course readings and discussions throughout this semester; and 4) to gain experience synthesizing and presenting information effectively in a multi-modal digital format.  One of the groups uploaded their video to YouTube, and I’m very pleased to showcase it here. Enjoy!

I definitely plan to incorporate more video projects in my future teaching.