Buckle up — another day at ICAME 47 hit the road with Jane Stuart-Smith. 🚐
Our third plenary was nothing short of a journey – and Jane Stuart-Smith made that quite literal. She opened with a deceptively simple question: does our research actually represent the terrain we are moving on?
From there, she took us on the road. Her project on Scottish English draws on data flowing from partners across the US and UK, with a team that drives the research — sometimes in a camper van, sometimes in a Land Rover, whatever the terrain demands. 🚐 And the terrain? Think Isle of Skye. Think Old Man of Storr. Rugged, breathtaking, and absolutely worth navigating carefully.
That metaphor carried her core message: the maps we use in research must truly represent the landscape we are exploring. In Stuart-Smith’s case, that landscape is the sociophonology of Scottish English — how vowel duration, r-realisation, and other features shift and evolve across region, class, age, and gender.
The morning then opened up into four parallel panels covering a wonderful range of topics — from metaphor to corpus software. The confluentes of ideas just keep flowing! 🌊