After over two years of online conferences, I attended the Acoustical Society of America in Denver. It was great to catch up with old friends and see posters in person. The posters were very spread out, which was great for the acoustics -- we could hear each other without yelling, and we weren't bumping into each other. It would be nice if we could do it that way forever!

Having a good time at virtual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), one of my favorite sociolinguistics conferences. I had two presentations: an invited panel discussion with my co-author Paul De Decker in Newfoundland about our work on remote audio data collection for vowel analysis, and a poster with my grad student Molly Landers about pre-lateral mergers in Oklahoma, where words like pull are pronounced like pole or pool, and words like dull sound like dole.
    It's a challenge to fit live morning sessions and watching pre-recorded talks into an otherwise normal mid-semester week, but I've decided I like the chance to mull things over a bit more compared to everything being packed into three full days in person. Plus, I can pause and go back over the videos and pore over posters before or after live Q&A sessions. The posters were presented live on Gather.Town, which is the best virtual poster format I've experienced over the many different options conferences have tried during the pandemic. And live Q&A worked very well on Zoom, which we all know how to use by now!  

Two students from my lab and I delivered talks at the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO) conference, held virtually this September. Molly Landers and I talked about pre-lateral mergers in Oklahoma, where words like pole and pull sound alike, and cull sounds like coal or cool. Molly has been measuring and plotting these vowels all year, and she's planning a follow-up study for her master's thesis. Zoe Haddad, now a second-year master's student, revisited her senior honors thesis about employer's attitudes toward Southern vowel features.  Both talks went very smoothly, and the online format allowed us to share our work at a time of the semester when it's hard for grad students to get away to travel. 

Now we're really getting creative.  My lab is trying a new social-distancing-compatible data collection method: having people record their own group discussions over Zoom or Skype.  In this study, we're asking people what "country" means where they're from (as in people or styles, not nations).  We'd like to get responses from all over the US - does "country" mean the same thing everywhere?  Is it good to be country in some places but bad in others?  Try it yourself: https://is.gd/0E4eVd.  More info: http://sophon.okstate.edu/projects/375-country.  Each participant will earn a $10 Amazon gift card by email.

With social distancing preventing our usual lab recordings, we're getting creative about data collection.  But with everyone working from their computers at home, people didn't mind taking a quick break to record themselves reading a few words and passages -- a couple dozen on the first day!  If you grew up speaking English in Oklahoma, you can participate here: https://is.gd/M03jmn. Or for more info, see: http://sophon.okstate.edu/projects/368-okie-english.  Each person will receive a $5 Amazon card by email.

My RA Jenna Curran and I traveled to New Orleans this January to present the first results from the Oklahoma "country accents" project at the American Dialect Society meeting, which takes place concurrent with the Linguistic Society of America conference.  We found that Oklahomans could identify imitations of country and Southern accents but the two were pretty similar in both imitations and perceptions.
It was great to catch up with old friends, too!