I like this point keeps going around comparing deaths in COVID-19 to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, but that it isn't effective should speak to a larger point about audience, spectacle, and the importance of categorizing an enemy with nefarious intents. 🧵1/13

What I don't like is this knack for science communicators to think that providing more statistics is going to sway people who don't register a threat. The idea seems to be that if we can find the right frames from which to calculate statistics, we can get to deniers 2/13

Research, for example that paper by Nowlan and Zane on agency and COVID fear, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, has shown that people who even believe in COVID but think free will trumps the threat of illness are less likely to be persuaded 3/13

Ok, real talk. I'm seeing a lot of PhD folks making arguments that PhDs are older than MDs; ergo, PhDs are the 'original' MDs. It doesn't matter if this is coming from STEM or the Humanities--it's a bad argument. MDs and PhDs are different. There are two concepts of 'doctor' here

As I've learned from my dear friend @MartinCamper, often times when we are faced with ambiguity, we make arguments to resolve it. But what do we gain here? I don't want to think that the only way to legitimize my work is to delegitimize a doctor's. We do different things.

So what, some dude thinks Jill Biden should drop the Dr. from her name. That guy's argument is that the world should change so that he doesn't have to deal with the ambiguity. When we have these fights over which kind of 'doctor' is better, we are doing the same thing. Stop.

Ryan Lepic @ryanlepic starts his keynote on ASL usage-based morphology and "sign schemas" in ASL by talking about how what he read as a graduate student shaped his identity and thinking about ASL linguistics #HDLS14

Lepic reminds us that SL Ling has a "structural problem," where we think everything is built out of building blocks and form neat categories that are well defined. But these questions miss variation and context common in SLs. We need a diff approach: usage-based cxg #HDLS14

Lepic: Here are five signs. People point out that these signs all start in the same place of articulation and also carry with them a feminine meaning. But this is the exception, not the rule. What we are seeing is not a morphological rule but a sign schema. #HDLS14

Excited for this keynote with the awesome Barbara Dancygier on viewpoint and multimodality #HDLS14

Dancygier asks how meaning is constructed multimodally--constructions, metonymy, image schemas, etc.--but at the same time, there's a need for a concept to bring all these concepts together, and viewpoint is perhaps that. Barbara shouts out future work with @alnellus #HDLS14

Dancygier clarifies: viewpoint doesn't need to be "someone's" viewpoint; she broadens viewpoint to understand it as a way to analyze conceptual alignment--which is necessary for being able to connect various non-visual phenomena (emotion, stance, etc.) in a larger network #HDLS14