The Update #1

Published by Marco Smolla on

Hello fellow researchers! Happy 2019! I hear you thinking, isn’t it already February? You are absolutely right. However, this is the first Update we are sending out in 2019. This is a new blog format where we report on what is going on inside ESLR and the committee. Talking of which, the committee had already two meetings this year.

Workshop design

We have been planning and discussing details of the ESLR Summer Workshop in June in Leipzig (From Theory to Data and Back Again). Dominik Deffner is the main organiser of the event. Together with many other helping hands in Leipzig we now have the workshop website and even an application form ready. So don’t miss to apply in time to take part in this fantastic workshop. We are also working on some really cool sticker designs with the workshop logo. Stay tuned for these ones.

ESLR GitHub Repository

We have also been talking about our public outreach project called Social Learning Wikipedia Task Force (or short, Social Learning WTF). We talked a lot about possible platforms where we could collaborate with members and non-members on improving Wikipedia pages concerning social learning and cultural evolution research. GitHub came up as an inexpensive (well, free) option that allows us to have a public forum but also version control for distributed content contribution. We will now create a ToDo list with potential pages that could and should be improved. If you are interested in contributing either join us on GitHub or send us an email. And of course, you don’t have to be a member to participate. Which brings me to our next topic. This week we say hello to our 40th Membership Guardian:

The Membership Guardian Chicken

To explain, we have a little widget in our Slack channel that pops up whenever someone joined the ESLR as a member. And it is absolutely fantastic that already 40 of those chickens appeared ❤️ A warm welcome and a hello to all our new members. We are happy for your support of ESLR. Which brings me to our last but not less important topic, the future of Cultured Scene. We love the society journal, and we hope you like it too. We are currently discussing whether we should move from a three-issue per year to a two-issue per year cycle. Fear not, we don’t plan to make Cultured Scene thinner as well. On the contrary. The plan is to have more in-depth articles focussed around different topics of research and science life. We are still working on the details but we will tell you more in the next Update. Have a fantastic month!

About the author

Categories: The Update

Marco Smolla

Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, with an interest in cultural evolution theory.