Lauren Collister

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT LAUREN COLLISTER

In my work, I have made it my mission to promote the use and understanding of digital culture and tools. Most recently, I have turned my focus to scholarly communication and advocacy for open infrastructure and open scholarship. I work for Invest in Open Infrastructure, an organization that is dedicated to improving funding and resourcing for open technologies and systems supporting research and scholarship. I am also an advocate and enabler of open scholarship as part of my work with the Linguistic Society of America, the Linguistics Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance, and various other disciplinary organizations and boards. This interest in open scholarship stems from my background as a scholar. As a researcher, my goal is to further the scholarly understanding of digital societies by researching how language is used as a social tool in online environments. By focusing on online gaming, I study cases where language and communication are not the primary focus of interaction. The activity-based nature of online games can reveal how language is used as a tool to achieve goals, while retaining its status as a resource for social knowledge. My research often relies on information and data freely given.I also have considerable experience as an instructor in university contexts. I have taught the courses Introduction to Linguistics, Language and the Internet, Sociolinguistics, Cross-Cultural Communication, and Language and Gender. As an instructor, my aim is to make the material accessible and interesting to students of all backgrounds, and to foster an intellectual curiosity about language. I guide students by showing them how linguistics is relevant to their daily lives and their chosen fields, and encourage them to explore new ways that the insights of linguistics can further their understanding of the world. My goal is to see the study of linguistics be a fundamental part of post-secondary education, and to bring the understanding of language as a science to as many scholars as possible. I strive to incorporate digital culture and online tools into my teaching in as many ways as possible in my courses.