Melissa Boiko @melissaboiko@scholar.social

organizing accounts:

this alt = linguistics, conlangs, academic life.

selfies, comments on books+comic books, transgender issues, politics, miscellanea = @elilla .

trying to keep this account’s public timeline more on-topic as per instance rules \o/

#introduction hallöchen! I’m a Brazilian trans woman living in Germany working on Japanese dialectal fieldwork (long story). Interests include fantasy fiction, imaginary languages, free software, comic books, intersectional veganism, cute cuddly things, and supporting anticapitalist revolutions to bring down the whole rotten edifice

#introductions #germany #bochum #nrw #linguistics #transgender #vegan

Green Open Access means I can publish the first submitted draft of my article, but not the peer-reviewed, corrected version (for a period of 2 years).

Now I understand why they asked that atrocious, eyebleeding typesetting standard (Latex not allowed, Times New friggin’ Roman in MS Word, double line spacing, 4cm margins all around). It’s so that I'm ashamed of publishing the first draft without retypesetting the whole thing…

after a lot of micro-editing and fiddling and stressing, I have just submitted the thing!!

I always feel like the ‘research directions’ section or equivalent is like ‘things that there should be in this article but weren’t’ 🤷‍♀️ now to wait for the rounds of peer review and try not to take it personally…

thanks for all of you beautiful people who supported me the past few days m(_ _)m

Some more revising, bit more reference fiddling and… I might have finished it????

I hope European Central Time still counts for the deadline! I'm super afraid of clicking send tho >.<

what is this that I just found? a conclusion???

before: “as you can see from my calculations this phenomenon happens more often in remote, low-contact areas.”

after: “as you can see from my calculations this phenomenon happens more often in low-contact areas AND also happens a whole lot in this one city in Shizuoka. it’s not clear why”

nailed iiitt

this is NOT a good time for the new data on old scripts to turn out to undermine your tentative theory

woke up drowsily, did my hormones, the all-important shaving, brewed some coffee. day 5/5. it’s now or never.

another long run, started actually dealing with the data now. might be reaching end of ability to stay up for tonight.

might start struggling with word count too—at 5500 currently, it is conceivable that I'll break the 8000 word limit.

next up, I have to resurrect some of my old code >.<

deadline is tomorrow but they didn’t specify the timezone.

I’m remembering this one conference in Melbourne (UTC+11) that set all deadlines to Niue time (UTC−11). some human beings are just good-hearted.

finished a technical section (on the super confusing rules+exceptions for Japanese compound noun accent), which took a lot of reference browsing (and conciliating) too. taking a breath from a long session in the zone.

still a long way to go tho… next up I'll have to fiddle with my old scripts, statistics, that sorta stuff ><

day 4/5!!! I failed to all-night, I'm getting old. (that, or it’s the progesterone…)

I am just done with the first section, which I think should be about half of the text itself. now comes the part where I talk about my original discovery, i.e. the part where everything is uncertain and tentative and I have no idea what’s going on

welp, guess that will be an all-nighter

day 3/5 send help

doing the ‘polishing’ work today cause it felt approachable. fully fixed all references, figures, examples etc. and added missing data comparison tables for the existing text. this stuff always takes more time than I expect!

day #2/5: so far I’ve purged Zotero from the Libreoffice document and I’m manually creating a Latex bibliography page with \nocites (for copy-paste).

Took a long while to find out how to coerce biblatex+Unified Linguistics Style to use British quotes (polyglossia doesn’t change that—and polyglossia british breaks my hyphenation for some reason; the trick is \usepackage[style=english,english=british]{csquotes} )

day #1/5 review: I moved forward a little bit! less writing and more refactoring, ordering, image editing, reference work, that kind of thing. there’s still a long way to go and not so many days left, I hope I can make this work…

just realised #zotero did ~not~ import all fields for all entries from my biber database. specifically, it seems like it can’t handle @crossrefs. this is going to be "fun".

at this point Zotero is starting to feel like more trouble than just doing the references manually. I could make a bogus Latex document to print the formatted references list and Ctrl+C it…

I guess there’s two basic approaches to citations, maps, tables etc.:
• Get text on the page first, write a draft, then on a second pass fix the details and polish it.
• From the start fill in everything properly so as to have less busywork later.

I leaned toward the first, though my advisor advocates the second. Guess I’m kind of going through it in a hybrid way now