local identity - Cornwall in England

via radio on April 25, 2011:
 
In England, Cornwall Pays No Mind To Royal Wedding
Prince William, who's second in line to the British throne, is marrying Kate Middleton on Friday. The images and voices that will fill the airwaves that day will portray a kingdom full of loyal and joyous subjects. But in Cornwall, where the map says it is part of England, they don't feel very English.
 
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/25/135697378/in-england-cornwall-pays-no-mind-to-royal-wedding

toys and gender and language

Gender stereotypes woven into language of toy ads

(word cloud to visually represent which words are most often used to market/package toys)

linguistic fun. FW: LOL

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12893416

LOL around the world

• mdr (and derivatives)

French version, from the initials of "mort de rire" which roughly translated means "dying of laughter"

• חחח‎/ההה

Hebrew version. The letter ח is pronounced 'kh' and ה is pronounced 'h'. Putting them together makes "khakhakha"

• 555

Thai variation of LOL. "5" in Thai is pronounced "ha", three of them being "hahaha"

• asg

Swedish abbreviation of the term Asgarv, meaning intense laughter

• mkm

Afghan abbreviation of the Dari phrase "ma khanda mikonom", which means "I am laughing"

mapping Online Dating word choices

Visualizations of online dating language, http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/05/visualizations-of-on.html

R. Luke DuBois... became fascinated with the language used in the profiles. So he overlaid data from 19 million online dating profiles onto US maps.
 
[interview with Turnstyle magazine] ...In addition to color-coded maps by gender, he also scanned a Rand-McNally Road Atlas into his computer and replaced the city names with unique words. "Not the word people used the most [in their dating profiles] – but the word that was used uniquely in that place – the word that shows up there more than anywhere else," said DuBois.  The atlas maps are labelled with 20,000 unique words. He rattled off some combinations:
 
Dallas – "rich"     Houston – "symphony"     Santa Cruz – "liberal"
Atlanta – "God," "company," "coca," "jazz," "protestant"

GIS and underwater archeology - example from Florida

David Conklin, a recent graduate of the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, describes his work at Little Salt Spring in Florida.  David used GIS and videography to produce a photomosaic image that could be used for recording context within an excavation level.

 

Clicking the link on the home page of the Museum of Underwater Archeology, http://www.themua.org