= What is your best experience with the Internet?
A daily chat with my sister who lives in Sri Lanka and the friends I have in Mexico, the USA, the UK, South Africa etc., because I've travelled a lot, for long periods all over the world.
My first year with a computer and the Internet. It was one long technical agony!
The website of The Linguist List gives an extensive series of links on linguistic resources: the profession (conferences, linguistic associations, programs, etc.); research and research support (papers, dissertation abstracts, projects, bibliographies, topics, texts); publications; pedagogy; language resources (languages, language families, dictionaries, regional information); and computer support (fonts and software).
The Linguist List is moderated by Helen Dry (Eastern Michigan University), Anthony Aristar (Wayne State University) and Andrew Carnie (University of Arizona). Helen Dry, who is interviewed here, is a professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University. Her major research interests are linguistic stylistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.
The Linguist List, which I moderate, has a policy of posting in any language, since it is a list for linguists. However, we discourage posting the same message in several languages, simply because of the burden extra messages put on our editorial staff. (We are not a bounce-back list, but a moderated one. So each message is organized into an issue with like messages by our student editors before it is posted.) Our experience has been that almost everyone chooses to post in English. But we do link to a translation facility that will present our pages in any of 5 languages; so a subscriber need not read Linguist in English unless s/he wishes to. We also try to have at least one student editor who is genuinely multilingual, so that readers can correspond with us in languages other than English.
= What has happened since our last interview?
We are beginning to collect some primary data. For example, we have searchable databases of dissertation abstracts relevant to linguistics, of information on graduate and undergraduate linguistics programs, and of professional information about individual linguists. The dissertation abstracts collection is, to my knowledge, the only freely available electronic compilation in existence.