I got a paper rejected from a generativist conference a few years ago. A generativist friend of mine said, “Why did you bother submitting your paper to that conference? You knew they were going to reject it.” I said, “Well, the conference was in town, so I figured I’d send something in anyway.” My friend proceeded to tell me a story from her early grad school days about reviewing papers for her school’s signature conference.

Last month I wrote those words on a slide I was preparing to show to the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, as a part of a presentation of my Digital Parisian Stage Corpus. I was proud of having a truly representative sample of theatrical texts performed in Paris between 1800 and 1815, and thus finding a difference in the use of negation constructions that was not just large but statistically significant.

It’s happened to me too: I’m angry, or upset, or excited about something. I go on Twitter. I’ve got stuff to say. It’s more than will fit in the 140-character limit, but I don’t have the time or energy to write a blog post. So I just write a tweet. And then another, and another. I’ve seen other people doing this, and I’m fine with it. But for a while now I’ve seen people doing something more planned, numbering their tweets.

I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I’m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be said . You may think you know said . It’s the past participle of say . You’ve said it yourself many times.

People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege.

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

I’m a parent. It doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else, it’s just a category that reflects some facts about me: I conceived a new human with my wife, we are raising and caring for that human, and we expect to have a relationship with him for the rest of our lives. Some people don’t take parenthood seriously, so it doesn’t impact their lives very much, but their kids suffer.

I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn?t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get a PhD. You can figure out pretty easily who Professor Bigshot is, if you care. I guess you could say I’m giving her a pseudonym for SEO reasons.

Data Science is all the rage these days. But this current craze focuses on a particular kind of data analysis. I conducted an informal poll as an icebreaker at a recent data science party, and most of the people I talked to said that it wasn’t data science if it didn’t include machine learning. Companies in all industries have been hiring “quants” to do statistical modeling. Even in the humanities, “distant reading” is a growing trend.

Last month I went on a walk with my friend Ezra. It was his birthday, so we walked for almost two hours, drinking coffee, eating cinnamon rolls, and talking about semantics and coding. The funny thing is that Ezra lives on the West Coast and I live in New York, so we conducted our entire conversation by cell phone, with him walking through Ballard and Loyal Heights, and me walking through Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst.