Current projects at ESLR
The summer is slowly progressing with hot and sunny days (at least in Philadelphia). Friends and colleagues are on annual leave or engaged in fieldwork. Meanwhile, the ESLR committee keeps working on a variety of projects. Here is a list of what is going on:
1. Social Learning WTF
At our public outreach activity at our Summer Workshop in Scotland the goal was to improve social learning related pages on Wikipedia. However, we noticed that (i) this takes more time than expected and that (ii) available pages were often little to not at all representative of the current state of social learning research. As continued effort and our contribution to public outreach, we are currently organising a group of society members to identify key topics that should be available on Wikipedia, create an overview of the current state of those topics on Wikipedia and what needs to be done to improve them, and then – well – get the work done. If you would like to join our Social Learning Wikipedia Task Force, get in touch it our social secretary.
2. ESLR Crucial Guide
The Crucial Guide (or Handbook) is going to be a useful collection of societies, conferences, and workshops, journals, grants and prizes, how-tos and now-whats, that will get your early career supercharged. The combined power of social learning and knowledge accumulation will make it easier to find your way around in this quickly expanding and highly interdisciplinary field. Look forward to special topics like How do I find a PhD? and I am a PhD, now what?.
3. Organising our third annual workshop (Leipzig, 2019)
Preparations have already begun for our next workshop. This time we will leave Europe’s largest island and gather in Leipzig, Germany. The workshop will be hosted by the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I don’t want to give away too much, but it is going to be a great hands-on workshop you won’t want to miss.
4. Preparation of the fourth issue of Cultured Scene
We have just published the third issue of our society journal Cultured Scene, but we are already planning the next issue. We want to hear your stories, your early-career experiences, your projects. Cultured Scene is a perfect opportunity to get your work out there and to gain writing experience. We have a variety of articles types such as Pitch to Publication, Behind the Paper Interview, Tech That (for new methods and techniques), and Culture goes Pop (a culture research pop-culture cross-over). Interested? Get in touch with our journal secretary.
5. Setting up an Editorial Board for Cultured Scene
We want to widen the spectrum of stories and disciplines that are represented in Cultured Scene. To this end, we need more help to organise and edit author contributions. Therefore, we are in the midst of setting up an editorial board for our journal. Interested? Get in touch with our journal secretary.
6. Where is Social Learning happening?
We are working on a map of universities, institutions, and labs that study social learning and cultural evolution, both across Europe and worldwide.
You study social learning? Tell us where you work. Tweet at @ESLRsociety using the #sociallearningmap hashtag.
If you have any questions regarding our work or you want to contribute don’t hesitate to contact the chair or vice chair directly.
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