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Winter Storm 2014 – intensive language science workshop, January 13 – 24, 2014

Winter storm 2013

Mark your calendars! Winter Storm, one of the signature activities of the language science community at the University of Maryland, will take place from January 13 – 24, 2014. Winter Storm is an intensive workshop that meets all day, every day for 2 weeks in late January, immediately preceding the Spring semester. It is open to all students and faculty interested in the study of language and it brings together researchers from many different areas of language science for training, collaboration, and interdisciplinary innovation.

A  multi-department team of students has been hard at work preparing the activities for Winter Storm 2014, which will feature the following:

  1. Experimental Methods Workshop (mornings, 8 sessions, 2 hours each). The workshop will provide an end-to-end experience in a number of experimental measures and analysis tools, and will also explore the feasibility of conducting experiments via the internet. Sessions will cover reading-time, lexical access, auditory perception and speech production measures. The sessions will also cover experimental design, IBEX (free online stimulus presentation software), Amazon Mechanical Turk (online crowd-sourcing platform), and R (statistical analysis software).
  2. Faculty Lunch Talks (8 lunchtime sessions). Free lunch will be provided.
  3. Special Interest Groups (afternoons, 8 x 1.5 hour sessions). In-depth group work facilitating interdisciplinary research collaborations. A call for specific themes for the SIGs will go out very shortly – ideas welcome!
  4. Afternoon Toolbox Series (afternoons, 6 x 1 hour sessions). The Series will include three sessions on corpus analysis and three sessions on LaTex (a document preparation system that can interface with R)
  5. Professional Development Sessions (afternoons, 2 x 1 hour sessions)
  6. Presentation Day (scheduled for last day, 4 hours). Participants will give summary presentations on the outcomes from the Special Interest Groups and the Experimental Methods Workshop.
  7. Happy Hour (Friday, first week) and Post-Winter Storm Social (Friday, second week)

Winter Storm is sponsored this year by the IGERT program, the Linguistics Department, the Maryland Language Science Center, and UMIACS. We anticipate around 100 student and faculty participants this year. More information to follow.