What I find interesting is how different companies use different methods to make themselves appealing to consumers.  The same company can even market its products differently simply because of a different neighborhood having a different type of people.  Something that is interesting is how clothing brands market their products differently to people based on location.  […]

The inspiration for our project was our mutual love for food and our propensity to dine out almost all the time. We decided to take our love of restaurants and show how there are multiple factors that contribute to the reputation that a restaurant develops in the minds of its patrons.

Our choice of restaurant to […]

This past semester, students in a new Sophomore Seminar offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Berkeley Language Center have taken significant steps toward understanding the complexity of language in multilingual environments like Berkeley.

Rather than focus on the speech or writing practices of bilingual individuals, however, participants […]

I’m at the 19th Sociolinguistics Symposium, being held August 21-24 at Berlin’s Freie Universität, and wanting to report out some of the happenings here. As is the case at any conference, there are far too many sessions going on to experience or report on anything but a fraction of the totality (I […]

As I began to write last time, waiting for my connecting flight back to California from the February 22-24 4th International Workshop on Linguistic Landscape, I had departed for this gathering in Addis Ababa with two conceptual questions and one applied question in mind. First, for the linguistic landscape workshop participants–a […]

My mind is awash with thoughts from last week’s linguistic landscape workshop in Ethiopia’s capital city—thoughts from the last two days of informal visits to the campus of Addis Ababa University, from a group excursion 300km through the countryside to the Debre Libanos Monastery and the Blue Nile Gorge, […]

As I write this post there are hundreds of Berkeley students and community members surrounding barricades and police tape (“POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS”) around Wheeler Hall, the site of a student ‘occupation’ (see updates here too) after the UC Regents’ passage of a budget including an unprecedented […]

Thanks to Alexis on FB for the latest collection of unnecessary quotation marks on signs, this time on Huffington Post.

My personal favorite from the group, a billboard ad from a pair of lawyers, it seems:

Waitz & Downer: Fighting for your “legal rights” since 1959

If you haven’t already, see the collection posted […]

여러분, 안녕하세요? (Hi, everyone!)

I’m writing this post for anyone on this blog, Found in Translation, but want to give a special shout-out to the summer language classes at Cal. And since I’m in Korea right now, and since I started studying Korean many years ago in a K1 summer language class at Berkeley (now I’m […]

“Mankind is no Island” by Jason van Genderen.

“There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between observation and accepted authority, or between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for […]

On Saturday my wife and I took a stroll through Tilden Park in Berkeley.  Just off Lake Anza we came across a small trail that led into Wildcat Gorge, shrouded by trees and cutting deep into the earth.  It was a fairly isolated trail, far removed from any sounds of civilization.  We even came […]

Seeing the super-giga-sized and somewhat creepy photo of the thousands of people assembled in front of the Capitol building last week for Obama’s inauguration, with its thousands of unsuspecting faces all looking intently toward the speaker in question, made me wonder: how many other things were going on on the same day, in […]

Today, as I step back into the non-place of the SFO departure lounge on the way to the workshop on linguistic landscape in Siena, I’m also taking a detour from the path to Livermore. By now I suppose I’ve passed the Berkeley library, the Southside lineup of more→

Previous posts in this ‘mini-series’ (tongue firmly in cheek)
Signs all the way home
Keep Off Media(n): What’s (in) a sign?

After passing the “KEEP OFF MEDIA(N)” signs on Shattuck Avenue on that hazy November morning, I rode to downtown Berkeley, where a few other signs caught my eye. Actually I was […]

Already more days have passed than I wanted since my first post on signs — I haven’t been carrying my camera around with me as I’ve been running around doing holiday shopping, bike has been in the shop, and with all the interesting things going on related to the end of the year, […]

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to use this space to post pictures of signs and talk about them — no, not the worn-out diagrams of tree-sounds and tree-concepts, the signifiers and signifieds of Saussure’s universe (though those are plenty interesting too). I’m talking about the kind of signs that you and I […]