A whole new way to make a living

I am not good at Twitter, but I find it extremely interesting, and it strikes me that smart young scholars can maybe make a killing there (in the economic sense of the word only, of course).

For example, I recently learned about the following two twitter bots:

First: Pentametron (https://twitter.com/pentametron), a bot that searches Twitter for tweets that are (accidentally?) in Iambic Pentameter, and retweets them.

Second: DeepDrumpf (https://twitter.com/DeepDrumpf), a bot that uses techniques from human language processing to produce Trump-like tweets by training a machine on things Trump has really tweeted.

Just think about what it would require to do either of these tasks - and then how such skills could be 'monetized'....

And this is why I love getting to work with Honors students.

The students enrolled for Honors in LING/ENGL322 are required to keep a blog, in which they post each week some new insight, share a study guide, or ruminate on something language-y.

When I get to read these entries, I'm amazed at the beautiful quality of writing, the visual sense that each author brings to their blog post layout, and the depth and care of the thoughts they express.

Some highlights for me from the first five weeks of the term:

• Laura writes about the history of the three orthographic systems used to write Japanese
• Jessica R. helps us to learn about dialectal differences in stress patterns in British vs. American English
• Kate provides useful resources for reviewing phonetics, finding extra credit, and learning the tricky vocabulary of Harley's chapter 1
• Hannah teaches about grammatical features in Thai, including how to syllabify words (and identify syllable boundaries) in that language.
• Jodie discusses a dialectal difference in prepositional use between British and American English
• Amber talks about speaking English in Greece and the joys and frustrations of doing so
• Jessica E. reports on a situation of language endangerment in Kenya after helping us with a review sheet for Harley's Chapter 3
• Rasheda is eloquent about the rhythm of words at the end of love
• Eva shares some insights about English as it's spoken when we're not paying attention to the prescriptive rules some of us have been taught to obey
• and Luis is keeping a Tumblr in which he touches on a lot of great issues - most recently, the internet and the pace of slang

I can't wait to see what they talk about next!