Gabriel Frazer-McKee

What does it actually take to win a SSHRC postdoc?

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

I have about a year left before I expect to submit an application for a postdoctoral fellowship.

That is enough time to improve a CV, but only if I have some idea of what “competitive” actually means.

Academic truisms are not especially helpful here. Depending on whom you ask, a successful postdoctoral applicant either needs several major publications, an international reputation and a finished book—or simply a good project and evidence that they can carry it out. Neither description is empirically anchored.

So I decided to look at the people who actually received SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowships.

The results were both more intimidating and more reassuring than I expected.

Who I looked at

The most recent set of recipients I could use was the Fall 2024 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowships competition. At the time of writing, the public SSHRC recipient page does not yet list the results of the September 2025 Canada Postdoctoral Research Award competition, so 2024 remains the latest publicly available cohort for this exercise. The 2024 competition funded 174 applicants.

I did not look at all 174.

SSHRC postdoctoral applications are evaluated by broad multidisciplinary committees. In 2024, Education, Linguistics, Psychology and Social Work were grouped together in Committees 4A and 4B. The current Canada Postdoctoral Research Award retains Committee 4 for the same four disciplines.

Since my own application would be in linguistics, I was primarily interested in successful applicants whose research was language-based or sufficiently language-adjacent to make the comparison useful: applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, language education, literacy and closely related work.

There is an important limitation here. SSHRC publishes the names, affiliations and project titles of award recipients, but it does not publish the committee assignment of each recipient. I therefore identified likely Committee 4 candidates from their project titles and disciplinary backgrounds and then checked public university profiles, publication records and other academic pages.

This is consequently a small purposive sample, not a census of Committee 4.

I also decided not to name individual researchers in the analysis below. All of the information is public, but the purpose is to understand the range of successful profiles—not to turn early-career researchers into an unsolicited ranking exercise.

What I was actually comparing

There is another important limitation.

I cannot reconstruct a successful SSHRC application from Google Scholar and LinkedIn.

Under the current Canada Postdoctoral Research Award, applications receive two equally weighted scores. Research potential and experience is worth 50%, while the quality of the proposed research program is worth the other 50%.

For the research-profile half, SSHRC tells reviewers to consider three things:

fellowships, scholarships or other awards obtained;
previous research experience and/or publications;
timely completion of doctoral studies, taking into account the nature of the program and circumstances that may have delayed an academic career.

The subcriteria are not independently scored. Reviewers make an overall judgment of research potential and experience. SSHRC also asks applicants to identify their three most significant research contributions, explain their influence and significance, describe their role in co-authored work, and discuss relevant research experience and the skills developed through it.

That means simply counting publications would miss much of what SSHRC is trying to evaluate.

Still, this half of the application is the part that can be approximated reasonably well from public information. For each researcher, I tried to reconstruct the profile that would have existed at the Fall 2024 application deadline, excluding later publications and awards wherever possible.

What the profiles looked like

The five profiles below illustrate the range I found among successful language-oriented or language-adjacent applicants.

Profile	PhD status in 2024	Research and publication record	Funding and other signals	What stood out
A — Applied linguistics	PhD completed in 2023	Several peer-reviewed publications, including clear lead-authored work	Major dissertation-completion fellowship plus a selective year-long dissertation fellowship	A mature and very coherent research specialization
B — Psycholinguistics / child language	PhD still underway	Two first-authored journal articles plus a first-authored conference proceedings paper	SSHRC graduate funding and two Ontario Graduate Scholarships	Good publications and funding, but hardly an enormous CV
C — Language education / translanguaging	PhD completed in 2022	Much more modest conventional journal record, supplemented by chapters and other scholarly work	Roughly 25 years of directly relevant professional language-teaching experience	Deep expertise and exceptional coherence between professional experience, PhD and postdoc
D — Education / academic literacy	PhD still underway	Multiple empirical publications, including substantial first-author work	Won both SSHRC and FRQSC doctoral competitions and received research prizes	The conventionally formidable profile of the group
E — Psychology / language and cognition	PhD still underway	Two first-authored journal articles plus two additional co-authored journal articles by the deadline	No major doctoral fellowship identified in the public record examined	Strong evidence of research productivity without a conspicuous major-funding record

The details behind those summaries are quite different.

Profile A completed a PhD in Applied Linguistics at Penn State in 2023. Penn State records both a selective Gil Watz dissertation fellowship—a year-long teaching release awarded for exceptional achievement in teaching, research and service—and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The research undertaken during the doctorate and the eventual postdoctoral project also form an unusually clear intellectual progression.

It is worth distinguishing that from simply being funded at a well-supported doctoral program. Strong institutional funding is valuable, but it is not the same signal as winning an external or selective fellowship. What interested me here was not merely that the researcher had financial support, but that other competitive processes had already recognized the research.

Profile B was still completing a Psychology PhD at Toronto. By the application deadline, the public record shows two first-authored journal articles and a first-authored CogSci proceedings paper, along with a SSHRC graduate scholarship and Ontario Graduate Scholarships in two successive years.

This was perhaps the most reassuring case. It is a strong doctoral record. It is not, however, the CV of someone who had somehow published eight first-author papers in Q1 journals before finishing a PhD.

Profile C looked different again. This researcher completed a PhD in Educational Studies in 2022 after approximately 25 years of work teaching English to adult newcomers. The conventional journal-publication record was comparatively modest, but the postdoctoral project emerged directly from both that professional experience and the doctoral research on newcomer belonging, multilingualism and translanguaging.

And then there was Profile D.

This researcher was still completing a doctorate in Education when applying, but had already accumulated multiple empirical publications, major doctoral funding and research prizes. In 2021, UQAM recorded the researcher as successful in both the SSHRC and FRQSC doctoral competitions; only weeks before the 2024 postdoctoral deadline, the Fonds de recherche du Québec awarded a Relève étoile Paul-Gérin-Lajoie prize for a doctoral publication.

That profile was intimidating.

But it was also clearly not the only kind of profile SSHRC funded.

Profile E adds another useful point of comparison. This researcher was still completing a Psychology PhD when applying. By the Fall 2024 deadline, the publication record included two first-authored journal articles—one in Cognition and Emotion in 2023 and another in Frontiers in Sociology in 2024—as well as two additional co-authored journal articles published in 2023.

Unlike several of the other researchers in this small sample, I could not identify a major national or provincial doctoral fellowship in the public record I examined. That absence should be interpreted cautiously: public profiles are incomplete, and failing to find an award is not proof that none existed. Still, there was no conspicuous funding record comparable to the SSHRC, FRQSC or selective dissertation fellowships visible for some of the other profiles.

The researcher subsequently moved into a MIND postdoctoral fellowship, but that later success is not part of the research profile I am reconstructing here. It is relevant only as an indication of where the trajectory led after the 2024 application.

This is a particularly useful case because the pre-application record is neither unusually sparse nor unusually prolific. Four journal articles, two of them clearly led by the applicant, is a strong doctoral publication record. It is also a plausible one.

So, what seems to matter?

The first conclusion I can tentatively put forward is that publications do matter.

Among the more conventional academic profiles I examined, one or two substantial lead-authored publications—and often at least two—were already present by the application deadline. Profile B had two first-authored journal articles plus a proceedings paper. Profile E had two first-authored journal articles plus two additional co-authored papers. Profiles A and D had still larger bodies of lead-authored work.

Profile C is the important exception: a researcher whose much longer professional trajectory and unusually close alignment between prior experience, doctoral work and proposed postdoctoral research provided a different form of evidence.

So while I would not turn “two papers” into a rule, if I were advising any aspiring postdoc applicants, I would want at least one or two substantial lead-authored publications arising during the PhD before applying.

More importantly, first authorship makes something visible that a raw publication count cannot: the applicant has already demonstrated an ability to take substantial ownership of a research project and bring it to publication.

I would rather enter the competition with two strong papers I clearly led than with a long list of peripheral co-authorships.

The second conclusion is that competitive funding is a major asset, but apparently not a prerequisite.

External scholarships and selective fellowships appeared repeatedly among the profiles I examined. They are unusually efficient signals: another competitive process has already evaluated the applicant and decided that the research was worth supporting.

But the comparison does not suggest that every successful applicant arrives with a major national doctoral fellowship. Profile E is particularly useful here: the public record shows clear evidence of research productivity and independence without an equally conspicuous record of major competitive doctoral funding. Profile C reached the competition through a very different professional and academic trajectory again.

For someone following a conventional doctoral-research path, major competitive funding clearly strengthens the case. But it appears to be one way of demonstrating research potential rather than an admission ticket to the competition.

Third, the PhD does not have to be finished.

Three of the five profiles above were still doctoral candidates when they applied. What seems more important is that the record already looks sufficiently mature: research has been completed, outputs exist, and the transition to a postdoctoral program is credible.

Fourth, coherence matters.

This may have been the strongest qualitative pattern.

The successful postdoctoral projects I looked at generally made sense in light of what the researcher had already done. Language maintenance led to further work on language maintenance. Child-language research developed into another language-development problem. Decades of teaching newcomers, followed by doctoral research on multilingual belonging, led naturally into postdoctoral work involving newcomer educators and translanguaging. Work in experimental psychology and language processing developed into research on bilingual reading.

The postdoc was not simply another project.

It was the next project.

That is encouraging because it means preparing for a postdoctoral fellowship is not necessarily about accumulating the largest possible number of unrelated accomplishments. It is about developing enough of a research identity that a reviewer can understand why this particular researcher should be the person undertaking this particular project.

Fifth, raw publication counts are probably the wrong thing to optimize.

The profiles reinforce a distinction between quantity and evidence of research independence.

A researcher with two or three substantial first-authored studies has shown something that may be much harder to infer from a longer list of peripheral co-authorships: they can formulate a question, conduct the work, and bring it through to publication.

That seems particularly important at the transition from PhD to postdoc, when the application is implicitly asking the committee to believe that the applicant is ready to undertake a more independent program of research.

Finally, there appears to be more than one way to look competitive.

One successful applicant had the sort of CV that makes another doctoral student close the browser tab and reconsider their life choices: major national and provincial funding, numerous empirical publications and research prizes.

Another had a much smaller conventional publication record but decades of relevant expertise and an extraordinarily coherent research trajectory.

Others were still PhD students with a couple of first-author papers and credible research records. One of those profiles did not appear to include a major doctoral fellowship at all.

All received the same fellowship.

Only half the equation

There is a danger in exercises like this.

It is easy to look at the weakest publication record among successful applicants and conclude that this is the bar. It is equally easy to find the strongest researcher and conclude that everyone below that level has no chance.

Neither inference is justified.

Most importantly, I have examined only half of the SSHRC evaluation.

The other 50% concerns the proposed research program: its originality and potential significance, feasibility, appropriateness of the proposed host institution, and the effectiveness of the support provided by that institution.

I cannot see the four-page proposals these researchers submitted. I cannot see their referee letters or host assessments. I cannot know whether someone with a comparatively modest publication record submitted an extraordinary proposal, or whether someone with a formidable CV merely needed a very good one.

Nor can I infer from a public CV how the committee itself interpreted that record.

The research profile therefore does not determine the result.

It determines whether I can enter that second half of the competition with a credible case that I have the experience to do what I am proposing.

What I am taking from this

Before looking at actual recipients, I had a fairly vague image of the successful SSHRC postdoctoral applicant: finished PhD, long publication list, several major prizes, perhaps already halfway to being an assistant professor.

That person exists.

They are just not the only person who wins.

My working target now is much more concrete. By the time I apply, I want a research profile with at least a small number of substantial lead-authored publications, strong evidence of research potential—competitive funding where possible—evidence that I can manage and complete substantial research, and an obvious intellectual progression from the PhD into the proposed postdoctoral work.

The small comparison above suggests that I do not need to become a publication machine.

I do need to demonstrate independence.

I do not necessarily need to have defended before applying.

I do not necessarily need every possible credential at once.

I do need to look like someone who is clearly approaching the end of a productive doctorate and is ready for the next research program.

And even if I accomplish all of that, I will have strengthened only half of the application.

The other half will still have to be an excellent proposal.

That will not guarantee anything.

It does, however, look remarkably similar to profiles that SSHRC has already funded.

And that is much more useful than trying to become competitive against an imaginary applicant who has published everything, won everything and apparently never needed to sleep.

The profile matters.

But it is only half the application.

My 2027 Grenoble trip is now funded

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

I received some very welcome news today: I have been awarded a SSHRC travel fellowship to support an upcoming international research stay as part of my doctoral work.

The fellowship will help cover the costs associated with spending several months working abroad with researchers whose expertise closely overlaps with my own. The stay will provide an opportunity to develop parts of my doctoral research in a different research environment, strengthen an existing collaboration, and spend sustained time working on questions at the intersection of neology, corpus linguistics, and computational methods. International research stays are enormously valuable, but they are also expensive. Transportation, temporary accommodation, and the practical costs of maintaining a research stay away from home add up quickly. Funding of this kind makes the difference between an opportunity that exists in principle and one that is actually feasible.

Getting the application in was a slightly unusual experience. The programme operates on a first-come, first-served basis, which meant that timing mattered considerably more than it does for most academic funding competitions. Once the call opened on 14 april, there was a fairly mad dash to get the application, supporting documents, and institutional approvals assembled and submitted as quickly as possible. It is not often that a grant application feels quite so much like trying to get concert tickets before they sell out. I got my application in about a week after the competition was announced. In Grenoble, I will be working with Olivier Kraif at Université Grenoble Alpes on the preparation and cleaning of my corpora and, in particular, on methods for distinguishing different types of occurrences: ordinary lexical uses, metalinguistic uses, quoted speech, and other contexts that need to be treated separately in the analysis on a massive scale.

The research stay will also give me the opportunity to visit a researcher with whom I may eventually hope to develop a postdoctoral project. That is still far enough away that I will save the details for another post—probably sometime next year—but being able to make that visit while already in Europe adds another dimension to the stay.

There is still quite a bit to organize before departure—and, in my case, a parental-leave schedule to rearrange—but receiving the fellowship removes one of the biggest uncertainties surrounding the stay.

I am very grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC/CRSH) for supporting this part of my doctoral research.

More on the research stay once it gets closer.

The Corpus Was There. Access Wasn’t.

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

The Corpus Was There. Access Wasn’t.

An eighteen-month search for newspaper data—and why Canada needs a text and data mining exception

This post has been eighteen months in the making.

Not because it took eighteen months to write, but because the search for a usable Canadian newspaper corpus has now lasted that long.

During that time, I have contacted heritage institutions, approached a public broadcaster, investigated commercial media databases, examined licensing terms, compared technical access routes, and consulted copyright specialists. Some possibilities initially appeared promising. Others collapsed almost immediately. A few led to prolonged exchanges before it became clear that the data could not be supplied in a form, at a price, or under conditions compatible with the research. In other cases, rights holders simply did not respond.

I am intentionally omitting the names of the institutions, organizations, companies, newspaper collections, and individuals involved. The purpose of this post is not to publicly litigate individual exchanges or assign blame to particular employees. Many of the people I contacted were helpful and were themselves constrained by copyright, licensing agreements, technical infrastructure, institutional mandates, or decisions made elsewhere in their organizations.

The problem is systemic.

My doctoral research requires a large collection of newspaper articles that can be searched and analyzed computationally. I had assumed that identifying a suitable source and obtaining access would be a preliminary methodological task. Instead, acquiring the corpus became a research project of its own.

The texts exist. They were born digital and remain available online. But there was no clear route for turning those archives into a corpus that could be legally obtained, securely retained, and analyzed computationally.

A further complication surfaced in many of these exchanges: the assumption that a request for a large textual dataset must involve artificial intelligence. I repeatedly had to explain that I was not seeking the articles to train a language model, develop a generative-AI system, or build a commercial product. The proposed research is corpus linguistics: counting linguistic forms, tracing their distribution over time, and modelling patterns of usage.

The distinction matters. Large collections of machine-readable text have become closely associated with generative AI, but not every computational analysis of language is AI—and not every request for textual data presents the same purposes, methods, or risks. Conflating established forms of corpus research with AI development added yet another layer of uncertainty to an already difficult access process.

That difficulty cannot be explained by technology alone. It reflects a deeper uncertainty in Canadian copyright law: text and data mining is not expressly prohibited, but neither is it clearly authorized through a specific statutory exception.

A corpus that existed everywhere and nowhere

My search eventually concentrated on three broad possibilities.

The first was a major heritage institution with extensive newspaper holdings. This seemed like the most natural place to begin. Preserving and facilitating access to documentary heritage is, after all, central to the role of such institutions.

The difficulty was not necessarily that the material did not exist. Rather, the institution did not appear to hold—or have the authority to supply—the kind of structured textual data required for computational analysis. Access designed for consulting individual documents is not the same as access to a corpus.

This distinction matters. A researcher may be able to find and read an article through a catalogue or database interface while remaining unable to download, index, or systematically analyze the larger collection from which it comes.

The second possibility was a major public broadcaster. Its archives offered the kind of longitudinal material that would be extremely valuable for linguistic research.

Here, too, the central challenge was not simply locating articles. It was determining whether the underlying texts could be supplied in bulk, who had the authority to authorize that use, what contractual or copyright obligations applied, and whether the archive existed in a technically usable form.

The third route was a commercial media-monitoring provider.

This was the option most likely to produce data immediately. It was also the least compatible with an ordinary academic research budget.

Even relatively limited access could cost thousands of dollars. More comprehensive access required annual contracts priced at levels that might be manageable for corporations, government departments, or major institutions, but were absurd for a doctoral project.

The prices were only part of the problem.

Some proposed contractual conditions would have imposed severe limits on retention, reuse, processing, or verification. From the provider’s perspective, these restrictions protected a commercial product. From the researcher’s perspective, they risked making rigorous corpus research impossible.

A corpus is not useful only once. It must often be cleaned, searched, corrected, reprocessed, annotated, validated, and revisited as the analysis develops. Research findings may need to be checked months or years later. Code and derived data may need to be tested against the original material.

A licence that gives a researcher temporary access while preventing meaningful retention or repeated analysis does not merely make research inconvenient. It can undermine the reproducibility and integrity of the project itself.

Some of the contractual proposals I encountered struck me as abusive. They sought to preserve extremely broad control over material being requested for legitimate, non-commercial, publicly funded research while imposing prices and conditions that placed meaningful access beyond the reach of most individual researchers.

I am deliberately not identifying the companies or contracts involved. The point is not that one provider behaved unusually badly. The point is that, in the absence of a clear legal and institutional framework for text and data mining, restrictive private contracts can become the only obvious route to legal certainty.

The result is a peculiar situation.

Canadian newspaper texts have been written, published, preserved, indexed, licensed, and commercialized. They can often be located and read one at a time. Yet obtaining them as a research corpus may remain prohibitively expensive, contractually impractical, legally uncertain—or dependent on receiving a response from a rights holder who may never reply.

What text and data mining actually requires

Text and data mining, usually abbreviated as TDM, refers to the automated analysis of large collections of material in order to identify patterns, relationships, changes, or other information.

The name can make the process sound more exotic than it is.

A human researcher can read an article, note which words occur, compare its vocabulary with another article, and record the results. A computer can perform related operations across hundreds of thousands of articles, allowing researchers to study patterns that no person could identify manually.

But the computer must first be able to process the texts.

In practical terms, that usually means creating or obtaining copies. Articles may need to be downloaded, converted into machine-readable text, stored locally, indexed, cleaned, tokenized, annotated, or repeatedly queried.

The researcher may have no interest in republishing the articles or making them available to the public. The copies are instrumental: they are required because computational analysis cannot occur without computational access.

Copyright law nevertheless regulates reproduction. This means that even research aimed only at extracting linguistic patterns may involve acts that engage copyright before the substantive analysis has begun.

Some jurisdictions have responded by adopting specific exceptions for text and data mining.

Canada has not.

Fair dealing and the Canadian grey area

The absence of an explicit TDM exception does not mean that text and data mining is necessarily unlawful in Canada.

Instead, researchers must look primarily to the more general doctrine of fair dealing.

Section 29 of the Canadian Copyright Act provides that fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody, or satire does not infringe copyright. Research is therefore expressly recognized as a legitimate purpose.

The expression fair dealing can be misleading to readers unfamiliar with copyright law. It does not simply mean behaving reasonably, acting in good faith, or using material for a worthy cause. It is a legal exception with a structured analysis.

The first question is whether the dealing was undertaken for one of the purposes listed in the Act. A bona fide academic corpus project would ordinarily have little difficulty identifying research as its purpose.

But that does not end the inquiry.

The dealing must also be fair.

The Supreme Court of Canada has identified six factors that may be considered when assessing fairness:

the purpose of the dealing;
the character of the dealing;
the amount of the dealing;
the alternatives to the dealing;
the nature of the work;
the effect of the dealing on the work.

No single factor automatically determines the result. Fairness must be assessed in light of the circumstances.

This flexible, contextual approach is one of the strengths of Canadian copyright law. Fair dealing has been treated as a users’ right rather than as a narrow loophole, and it should not be interpreted restrictively.

But flexibility can also produce uncertainty.

The difficulty is not establishing that corpus linguistics constitutes research. The difficulty is determining whether the technical acts required to build and analyze a very large corpus will be regarded as fair.

Consider the purpose of the dealing.

A non-commercial doctoral project undertaken to investigate linguistic change would appear to sit comfortably within the research purpose. The researcher may have no intention of replacing the original publications, redistributing the articles, or providing a competing archive.

Now consider the amount of the dealing.

Corpus research may require complete copies of hundreds of thousands of articles. Even if the software ultimately extracts only word counts, dates, frequencies, or statistical patterns, the intermediate process may require reproducing each article in full.

This can look very different from the familiar example of quoting a short passage in a scholarly publication.

The character of the dealing raises further questions. Are the copies retained or destroyed? How many people can access them? Are they placed online, or held securely on an encrypted research drive? Must each computational operation create another temporary copy? Can the corpus be preserved long enough to permit verification?

The alternatives factor is also difficult to apply.

In theory, a researcher might consult the articles individually through an institutional database. But manually reading hundreds of thousands of texts is not a realistic alternative to computational analysis. More importantly, it is not an alternative method of performing the same research. It is an entirely different kind of inquiry, incapable of answering many of the same questions.

The effect on the market may be similarly ambiguous.

A secure research corpus does not necessarily replace a newspaper subscription, a media-monitoring service, or public access to the original articles. The researcher may publish only aggregate results and a small number of illustrative quotations.

At the same time, a commercial provider may argue that bulk access itself forms part of an existing or potential licensing market. The fact that someone is willing to sell a licence can therefore become part of the argument that researchers should be required to purchase one—even when the licence is unaffordable or its conditions are incompatible with the research.

These factors do not produce an obvious answer.

A careful fair-dealing analysis may provide strong support for some forms of non-commercial TDM. But it does not give Canadian researchers a simple statutory rule saying that the technically necessary reproduction of lawfully accessed material for computational research is permitted.

That is the grey area.

TDM is not clearly excluded from fair dealing. Nor has Parliament expressly defined the conditions under which it is allowed. Researchers and institutions must therefore apply a general, fact-specific legal test to technical practices that can involve vast numbers of complete works.

Consulting the copyright office

Because of this uncertainty, I consulted my university’s copyright office.

The central issue was not whether my project counted as research. It plainly did. The harder question was whether obtaining, reproducing, retaining, and computationally processing a complete newspaper corpus would constitute fair dealing.

The consultation helped me identify the relevant legal factors and the precautions that would make the proposed use more defensible.

The corpus would be used only for non-commercial academic research. Access would be tightly restricted. The complete articles would not be redistributed. Published findings would consist primarily of aggregate results, with only limited excerpts reproduced where necessary. The material would be securely stored and eventually destroyed according to a documented retention schedule.

These safeguards matter.

They distinguish corpus analysis from the creation of a competing newspaper archive. They reduce the risk that research copies could substitute for commercial access to the original works. They also demonstrate that the amount copied is connected to the technical requirements of the research rather than to an intention to republish the material.

But precautions do not eliminate the underlying uncertainty.

A copyright office can advise researchers on how the existing law might apply. It can help them reduce risk and document responsible practices. It cannot supply the explicit statutory protection that Canadian law currently lacks.

The result is that the legality of a major component of a doctoral project may depend on a contextual analysis for which there is no clearly controlling Canadian TDM rule.

Why this took eighteen months

Any research project involving a large dataset will require planning.

Archives must be evaluated. Metadata must be inspected. Formats must be tested. Licensing conditions must be read. Privacy and research-ethics requirements must be considered.

Some delay was therefore inevitable.

But eighteen months is not a normal amount of time to spend establishing whether a body of lawfully accessible published texts can be computationally analyzed for non-commercial academic research.

During those eighteen months, I pursued potential partnerships, investigated public archives, contacted rights holders and data providers, considered commercial contracts, examined technical alternatives, and sought legal guidance.

Sometimes the answer was no. Sometimes the answer came only after several referrals. Sometimes the proposed price or contract made the route unusable. And sometimes there was no answer at all.

That last category matters. In a system that relies heavily on permissions and individualized negotiation, silence becomes a practical veto. A researcher can follow up, clarify the project, supply security plans, and offer to sign reasonable conditions, but cannot negotiate with an organization that does not respond.

Rights holders are under no general obligation to prioritize a doctoral researcher’s request. From their perspective, such inquiries may be unusual, administratively burdensome, or commercially unimportant. But when permission is treated as the safest—or only—route forward, non-response can halt an otherwise legitimate project indefinitely.

Each route introduced a different uncertainty.

One institution might possess the documents without possessing extractable text. Another might possess usable text without holding all the relevant rights. A commercial provider might offer both access and apparent legal security, but at an absurd price and under contractual terms incompatible with reproducible research. A rights holder might simply leave the request unanswered.

At several points, the problem seemed close to resolution. A promising contact would refer the request elsewhere. A technically plausible solution would expose a legal uncertainty. A licensing discussion would reveal conditions that made the resulting corpus practically unusable. A carefully prepared request would disappear into an inbox.

This is why the post itself has been eighteen months in the making.

It would have been premature to write it after the first rejection, the first unreasonable quote, or the first unanswered message. At that stage, the problem might still have been local: the wrong contact, the wrong archive, the wrong provider, or an unusually complicated request.

After eighteen months, the pattern is harder to dismiss.

The obstacle is not merely that one institution could not help. It is that Canada lacks a coherent legal and institutional pathway through which researchers can obtain and analyze large textual collections.

Why institutional access is not enough

It is tempting to respond that university libraries already subscribe to newspaper databases.

They do. Those subscriptions are indispensable for reading, teaching, and conventional scholarly research.

But access to a search interface is not necessarily access for text and data mining.

A database may allow users to locate articles, display them individually, save a limited number, or export citations. Those functions are designed around human reading and document retrieval.

Corpus research requires something different: the capacity to process the collection systematically.

The technical ability to view every article one at a time does not imply permission to download the collection. Nor does a university subscription necessarily give its researchers the right to crawl the interface, automate searches, retain the resulting texts, or perform large-scale computational analysis.

Contractual terms may prohibit precisely the operations that make TDM possible, even when the researcher already has lawful access to read the material.

This is an important distinction because copyright exceptions and contracts do not always operate identically.

Even where a researcher believes that an activity could qualify as fair dealing, a licence agreement governing access to a database may impose additional restrictions. Institutions may consequently take a cautious approach, particularly when breaching a contract could jeopardize access for the entire university.

In practice, the safest route may therefore appear to be a separate commercial TDM licence.

That returns the researcher to the problem of absurd prices and restrictive contracts.

The European contrast

The European Union has addressed this issue more directly.

Its 2019 copyright directive requires an exception for reproductions and extractions made by research organizations and cultural heritage institutions in order to conduct text and data mining for scientific research, provided they have lawful access to the works. It also allows research copies to be retained under appropriate security conditions.

The European approach does not make all material free.

Researchers still need lawful access. Security measures may be required. The exception does not authorize the public redistribution of complete copyrighted collections.

What it does is recognize a basic technical fact: computational analysis normally requires reproduction.

Rather than forcing every researcher to argue that these technically necessary copies are fair under a general exception, the law addresses TDM explicitly.

Canada asks researchers to reach a similar conclusion through fair dealing, without telling them clearly when that conclusion is correct.

Why fair dealing is not enough

Fair dealing remains essential.

A rigid copyright system capable of permitting only narrowly enumerated activities would quickly become obsolete. The flexibility of fair dealing is precisely what allows Canadian law to accommodate new forms of research and expression.

But flexibility is not the same thing as certainty.

When a research method routinely requires the reproduction of complete works at scale, leaving its legality to a project-specific balancing exercise creates significant practical costs.

Large institutions may be able to obtain detailed legal opinions, negotiate bespoke agreements, or purchase expensive licences. Individual researchers, graduate students, smaller universities, and underfunded projects generally cannot.

The ambiguity also encourages institutional risk aversion.

An archive or library may possess both the material and the technical capacity to provide it, but remain unwilling to do so because its authority is unclear. A publisher may default to refusal because granting access appears legally or contractually complicated. A researcher may abandon a defensible project because no one can provide an unequivocal answer—or because the relevant rights holder never responds.

Meanwhile, commercial providers can offer certainty at a price.

This transforms legal ambiguity into a commercial advantage. The less clear the public-law position becomes, the easier it is to present a costly private licence as the only safe option.

That is a poor foundation for publicly funded research.

Canada needs a TDM exception

Canada sorely needs an explicit text and data mining exception.

Such an exception would not mean that researchers could take anything they wanted from anywhere on the internet.

It would not eliminate the requirement for lawful access. It would not authorize the redistribution of complete newspaper archives. It would not prevent reasonable security requirements. It would not remove the need to address privacy, confidentiality, research ethics, or the protection of unpublished and sensitive material.

It would establish a much narrower principle:

Researchers who already have lawful access to works should be permitted to make the copies technically necessary to analyze those works computationally, subject to appropriate safeguards.

That principle would not eliminate every difficulty I encountered over the past eighteen months. Heritage institutions would still face technical limitations. Publishers would still need to locate and prepare data. Researchers would still need to fund some extraction and infrastructure costs.

But the legal starting point would be clear.

Institutions would not need to decide from scratch whether large-scale computational analysis could qualify as fair dealing. Researchers would not need to treat ordinary corpus construction as a potential copyright problem. A legitimate project would be less dependent on whether a rights holder chose to answer an email. Commercial providers could still sell valuable services, but legal uncertainty would no longer make their contracts appear to be the only viable route.

Most importantly, access to computational research would depend less heavily on institutional wealth.

The ability to study Canadian language, journalism, politics, culture, and history at scale should not be reserved for researchers who can afford five-figure data contracts—or who happen to receive a favourable response from every organization whose cooperation may be needed.

After eighteen months of pursuing archives, institutional partnerships, commercial access, technical workarounds, legal advice, and unanswered permission requests, I have reached a fairly simple conclusion.

The data exists.

The research is legitimate.

The necessary safeguards are entirely manageable.

What is missing is a clear legal framework.

Canada should stop leaving text and data mining in a grey area.

It should enact an explicit TDM exception.

pipx is glorious

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

I recently installed ASReview inside a Python virtual environment. This was technically the correct thing to do. It was isolated from the rest of my Python installation, unlikely to create dependency conflicts, and easy to remove if something went wrong.

There was only one problem: I knew perfectly well that, six months from now, I would have no idea where I had installed it.

I would remember that ASReview was somewhere on my computer. I might even remember creating a virtual environment for it. But I would probably not remember what I had called the environment, where I had placed it, or which sequence of commands was required to reactivate it.

Then I discovered pipx.

The problem with installing Python applications

Python packages are not all used in the same way.

Some are libraries that belong to a particular project. If I am writing a script that imports pandas, numpy, or a specialized text-processing library, those dependencies should normally live inside that project’s virtual environment. The environment records what the project needs and prevents its dependencies from interfering with those of another project.

Other Python packages are really applications. I do not primarily want to import them into my own code. I want to type a command, launch the program, and use it.

ASReview is a good example. It is written in Python, but from my perspective it is a research application. I want it to behave like an ordinary installed program—not like a fragile collection of packages hidden inside a folder I must remember to activate.

Installing such tools directly into the base Python environment is tempting, but eventually creates a thicket of shared dependencies. Installing each one in its own virtual environment is cleaner, but makes the applications inconvenient to find and launch.

pipx provides the missing middle ground.

What pipx does

When I run:

pipx install asreview

pipx creates a dedicated virtual environment for ASReview and installs the program inside it. It then makes the application’s command available from the terminal without requiring me to activate that environment manually.

The result combines the best parts of both approaches:

ASReview remains isolated from other Python applications.
Its dependencies do not clutter my base Python installation.
I can launch it from anywhere.
I do not have to remember where its virtual environment lives.
I can see and manage my installed applications from one place.

In other words, pipx treats Python command-line applications like applications.

This seems obvious in retrospect. It also feels faintly miraculous after years of manually creating environments, activating them, forgetting them, and occasionally installing things into the wrong Python interpreter.

A much more intelligible system

The commands are refreshingly straightforward:

pipx list

shows the applications managed by pipx.

pipx upgrade-all

updates them.

pipx uninstall asreview

removes ASReview and its isolated environment.

The environments still exist, but I no longer have to manage them individually. pipx handles that machinery while presenting a simple application-level interface.

This is exactly the kind of abstraction that makes a technical workflow more sustainable. It does not eliminate virtual environments. It uses them properly and then gets them out of the way.

When pipx is—and is not—the answer

My new rule is simple.

If a Python package is something I intend to import into a project, it belongs in that project’s virtual environment.

If it is something I intend to run as a standalone command or application, it is probably a candidate for pipx.

That distinction also prevents overusing it. A library such as pandas does not belong in pipx, because my scripts need access to it within their own environments. A tool such as ASReview, which I want to launch and use independently, fits the model extremely well.

Not every Python installation question is solved by pipx. But an unexpectedly large and irritating category of them is.

The joy of boring infrastructure

Research workflows accumulate tools: screening applications, bibliographic utilities, corpus-processing programs, converters, validators, and small command-line programs installed for one specific task. The difficult part is often not learning to use them. It is keeping them installed in a way that remains understandable several months later.

A good technical setup should reduce the number of things I must remember.

I should not need to recall that a program was installed in a folder called asreview-env, under a particular project directory, using a particular copy of Python. I should only need to remember that the program is installed.

That is what pipx gives me.

It is isolated virtual environments without the inconvenience, global commands without the dependency chaos, and package management that corresponds to how the software is actually used.

Glorious.

Preparing for a postdoc fellowship

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

Although I am still in the middle of my PhD, I have reached the point where it is no longer too early to start thinking about what comes next.

If all goes according to plan, I will begin applying for postdoctoral fellowships in roughly fourteen months. That sounds comfortably far away. Yet, the more I learn about the process, the more it seems that successful applications are built long before the call for proposals even opens.

This is therefore not a guide to applying for postdoctoral fellowships. I have not yet written a single application, and I certainly do not claim to know the best strategy. Instead, I want to document the preparation phase: the questions I am asking, the decisions I need to make, and the work that happens before a proposal ever reaches a review committee.

What I know so far

At the moment, I know remarkably little.

I know that I will need a strong publication record. I know that my doctoral research should lead naturally into a postdoctoral project while still demonstrating intellectual independence. I know that choosing collaborators, institutions, and funding opportunities will matter.

Beyond that, there is a surprising amount of uncertainty.

How many publications should I realistically aim to have before applying? When should I begin contacting potential supervisors? How closely should a postdoctoral project build on my doctoral work? How much should I prioritize methodological training, networking, grant writing, or simply finishing my dissertation?

These are questions that rarely appear in graduate handbooks, yet they probably shape the outcome of an application just as much as the proposal itself.

The next fourteen months

Over the coming year, I hope to turn those uncertainties into a concrete plan.

Some of that work will be visible: finishing manuscripts, presenting research, developing collaborations, and continuing to build a coherent research profile.

Other parts will happen quietly in the background: reading successful fellowship applications where possible, learning about different funding agencies, identifying potential research environments, and thinking carefully about where I want my research to go after the PhD.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge will be balancing two competing priorities. Before I can prepare convincingly for a postdoc, I first have to finish the PhD that makes me eligible to apply in the first place.

Questions I hope to answer

Over the next fourteen months, I hope to gradually answer questions such as:

What distinguishes a competitive fellowship application from a merely good one?
How ambitious should a postdoctoral project be?
What makes a strong host institution or supervisor?
Which parts of an application require months of preparation, and which can be completed once a competition opens?
What should I be doing now that my future self will thank me for?

I suspect that my answers will change as I gain experience, and that is precisely why I want to write about them.

Looking ahead

For obvious reasons, I will not be discussing the details of any future research proposal before it is submitted. Ideas evolve, collaborations take shape gradually, and some aspects are best kept confidential until the appropriate time.

What I can share is the process.

Over the next year or so, I hope to write occasionally about what I learn while preparing for this next stage of my academic career. If nothing else, it will provide a record of the decisions, uncertainties, and lessons that rarely appear on a CV—but often make the difference behind it.

PhD protocol #1 published in F1000Research

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

I am very pleased to share that the protocol for the first study of my doctoral thesis has now been published in F1000Research.

The article, entitled “Linguistic and extralinguistic factors associated with neological (non-)diffusion: A protocol for a scoping review of the English- and French-language literatures (1952–2026),” sets out the methodological plan for a scoping review on the factors associated with the diffusion — and non-diffusion — of neologisms.

This is an important milestone for the thesis. The review aims to map how researchers have studied neological diffusion across more than seven decades of English- and French-language scholarship. More specifically, it asks what kinds of linguistic, social, institutional, communicational, and methodological factors have been associated with whether new lexical items circulate, stabilize, remain marginal, or disappear.

Publishing a protocol is not the same thing as publishing results, but that is precisely why I find it valuable. A protocol makes the research design visible before the review is completed. It clarifies the questions being asked, the sources being searched, the eligibility criteria being applied, and the information that will be charted from the included studies. For a project that deals with a heterogeneous literature — across linguistics, terminology, lexicography, sociolinguistics, corpus studies, and related fields — that kind of explicit methodological groundwork is essential.

The article is also part of a broader commitment to open and transparent research practices. The protocol is accompanied by materials deposited on OSF, including search documentation and data-charting resources. My hope is that these materials will make the review easier to evaluate, reproduce, and build on.

I am grateful to my co-authors, Émilie Paquette Raynard, Nicolas Gignac, Davie Dulude, and Bruno Courbon, for their contributions to this project. I am especially thankful to Bruno for his continued guidance as the thesis takes shape, and to the team for helping move this first major piece of the project forward.

The next step is to complete the review itself: finishing the source collection, screening the records, charting the data, and synthesizing what the literature can tell us about the conditions under which neologisms diffuse — or fail to diffuse.

It feels good to see this first protocol published. Doctoral work often advances through long stretches of planning, reading, revising, and reorganizing before anything becomes publicly visible. This publication makes one part of that work visible, and marks a real step forward in the thesis.

Neologisms in Tourism

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

On Friday, I attended Giovanni Tallarico’s presentation on neologisms in the field of tourism. I followed the talk online from home, in the slightly improvised conditions that have become familiar this year: laptop open, notebook nearby, and Georges requiring attention at regular intervals. It was not the most conventional conference setting, but it was a very real one.

The presentation was especially interesting to me because tourism offers a rich testing ground for the study of neology. New words in this domain do not emerge only because new objects or practices need to be named. They also circulate through institutions, promotional discourse, regional identities, commercial branding, and changing cultural imaginaries of travel. Tourism vocabulary sits somewhere between specialized terminology, public-facing communication, and everyday language. This makes it a particularly useful site for thinking about how neologisms are formed, stabilized, and diffused.

One aspect that stood out to me was the way tourism neology can reveal tensions between linguistic creativity and institutional framing. A new tourism-related term may begin as a descriptive label, a promotional invention, a regional marker, or a calque from another language. But once it begins circulating, it can be taken up by dictionaries, tourist offices, journalists, online platforms, and speakers themselves. In other words, tourism vocabulary gives us a compact view of several processes that matter more broadly in neology: formation, selection, legitimation, and diffusion.

The talk also connected closely with questions I am currently working through in my own research. My doctoral project focuses on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors associated with the diffusion and non-diffusion of neologisms. Tallarico’s examples were a reminder that diffusion is rarely just a matter of linguistic form. The social life of a word depends on who uses it, where it appears, what kinds of texts carry it, and whether institutions or communities have reasons to repeat it.

This was also a good reminder that specialized domains are not closed linguistic spaces. Tourism, in particular, constantly moves between expert discourse and general discourse. A term may be created within a professional context but addressed to tourists, residents, policymakers, or the general public. That movement across audiences is precisely where neological diffusion becomes visible.

Attending from home while taking care of Georges made the event feel less like a break from ordinary life than a continuation of it. I was listening to a talk about how words travel while managing the small logistics of family life in the background. In a way, that felt appropriate: diffusion is also about circulation across spaces, routines, and contexts. Academic ideas, like words, do not move in ideal conditions. They move through the actual conditions we have.

Overall, the presentation gave me several useful points to think about as I continue working on my scoping review and on the empirical parts of my thesis. Tourism neology seems to offer not only a specialized lexical field, but a particularly clear window onto the broader mechanisms through which new words become visible, usable, and sometimes durable.

The JDL 2025 proceedings are now available

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

As editor-in-chief, I am pleased to announce that the proceedings of the 38th Journées de linguistique, held at Université Laval on March 5 and 6, 2025, are now available online.

Of the nine manuscripts submitted after the conference, five completed the editorial process and are included in the volume. They reflect the diversity of the work presented at the JDL, with contributions addressing different languages, theoretical questions, empirical materials, and methodological approaches. As always, the proceedings provide students and early-career researchers with an opportunity to develop a conference presentation into a complete scholarly publication.

The volume also includes my editorial, “Préparer un résumé scientifique informatif et bien structuré : un facteur clé pour être accepté·e en colloque”. Abstracts are often treated as a minor preliminary exercise, but they play a decisive role in how a proposal is evaluated and in whether readers can understand the purpose, methods, and contribution of the research. The editorial draws on recurring issues encountered when evaluating and editing student submissions.

Developmental editing

Producing the proceedings involved much more than receiving manuscripts and correcting their formatting. As editor-in-chief, I coordinated a process of developmental editing, with substantial feedback intended to help the authors strengthen their argumentation, organization, methodology, and presentation.

This approach requires considerable work from both the editorial team and the authors. It also reflects the pedagogical purpose of the JDL proceedings: the objective is not simply to reproduce conference papers, but to accompany emerging researchers through the process of preparing a publishable article.

For this edition, we have also published the project timeline. Editorial timelines are rarely visible to readers, even though they shape the experience of authors and determine whether conference proceedings appear while the research remains current. Making the timeline public is one way of documenting the work involved and establishing clearer expectations for future volumes.

I am very pleased to see the project completed and the authors’ work made available. The publication of the proceedings marks the final stage of the 2025 Journées de linguistique and the result of a sustained collective effort extending well beyond the two days of the conference.

My first invited conference presentation

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research. This particular activity was formally cleared by Université Laval’s BBAF

Today, I gave my first invited conference presentation.

Because I am currently on parental leave, I cleared my participation with the BBAF beforehand. The presentation concerned work completed before the beginning of my leave: the protocol for our scoping review of the linguistic and extralinguistic factors associated with neological diffusion.

The talk gave me an opportunity to present the logic of the review in greater detail: why the literature needs to be mapped systematically, how we intend to identify relevant studies, and how we plan to extract and classify the many different factors that researchers have associated with the diffusion—or non-diffusion—of new words.

I do not particularly enjoy giving presentations. Preparing them takes time, and I rarely feel entirely comfortable speaking in front of a room. Still, presentations have a value that is difficult to reproduce through publications alone. They make it possible to discuss a project while it is still developing, receive immediate reactions, and meet people whose expertise may help move the work forward.

That was certainly the case today.

I met Xavier Darras, from the Office québécois de la langue française, and Giovanni Tallarico. Both responded favourably to the project and indicated that they would do what they could to help us recruit specialists for the scoping review.

This is especially valuable because the next stage of the review depends on obtaining informed feedback from researchers and practitioners with expertise in neology, terminology, and related fields. Identifying relevant specialists—and persuading them to contribute their time—is not a minor part of the process.

The presentation therefore accomplished more than simply communicating the protocol. It helped create connections that may strengthen the review itself.

I am still unlikely to become someone who looks forward to presenting. But today was a useful reminder that the most important part of a conference presentation may happen after the final slide.

My first experience as a peer reviewer

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

My first peer review

I recently completed my first peer review for an academic journal (Lingua, to be precise).

When the invitation arrived, my first reaction was hesitation. The manuscript dealt with a subject adjacent to my own research, but not one in which I would describe myself as a specialist. I knew some of the relevant literature and was comfortable with the broader theoretical questions, yet I worried that this was not enough. Was I really the right person to evaluate the work of another researcher?

Eventually, I realized that I had misunderstood why I had been invited. The editors were not necessarily asking me to know everything about the manuscript’s highly specific subject. They were asking whether I could assess the argument from a broader perspective: whether the paper made its contribution clear, situated that contribution within a larger scholarly conversation, and provided evidence that supported its principal claims.

Seen in those terms, I did have something useful to offer.

As I read the manuscript closely, three main problems emerged.

The argument was buried

The paper appeared to contain an interesting central idea, but the reader had to work too hard to find it. Important claims were dispersed across the manuscript, while substantial space was devoted to material that did not clearly advance the argument.

This was not merely a stylistic problem. When the structure of a paper obscures its central claim, it becomes difficult to determine exactly what the evidence is intended to demonstrate. A reader should not have to reconstruct the paper’s purpose from scattered observations.

The review therefore became partly an exercise in identifying the argument that the manuscript seemed to be trying to make—and explaining how its organization prevented that argument from becoming fully visible.

The paper did not establish its broader relevance

The manuscript addressed a relatively specific phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with specificity; much valuable research begins with a narrow object of study. However, a specialized case still needs to be connected to a more general problem.

The paper did not sufficiently explain why readers outside its immediate area should care about the analysis. What larger theoretical question did the case help resolve? What did it reveal that could not already be seen in the existing literature? Could the analysis change how researchers understood a broader category of phenomena?

Without that bridge, the paper risked presenting an observation that might be locally interesting but whose wider significance remained uncertain.

This was perhaps where my distance from the precise subject was most useful. A specialist might already understand why the topic matters. A less specialized but informed reader needs the manuscript to demonstrate that relevance explicitly.

Some of the main claims were not empirically established

The most serious difficulties concerned the relationship between the evidence and several of the paper’s central conclusions.

Some claims were presented more strongly than the empirical material appeared to permit. In other places, the proposed diagnostic did not consistently distinguish the phenomenon under examination from plausible alternatives. The paper sometimes moved from an interesting interpretation to a general conclusion without providing enough evidence for the intermediate steps.

This did not necessarily mean that the authors’ interpretation was wrong. It meant that the manuscript, in its current form, had not yet demonstrated that it was right.

That distinction became important while writing the review. A reviewer is not asked to replace the authors’ analysis with their own preferred account. The task is to examine whether the conclusions follow from the method, examples, and reasoning that the manuscript actually presents.

What I learned

Before completing this review, I imagined that reviewing required a kind of encyclopedic authority: that I should accept an invitation only when I knew nearly everything about the manuscript’s subject.

The experience changed my understanding of the role. Subject-specific expertise is certainly important, but it is not the only expertise involved in peer review. A reviewer may also contribute by evaluating the architecture of an argument, the connection between evidence and conclusions, the relevance of the work beyond its immediate case, or the assumptions that specialists might otherwise leave implicit.

In this instance, not being the narrowest possible specialist may even have helped. I could approach the manuscript as a knowledgeable reader who understood the general field but still needed the authors to make their reasoning explicit.

Writing a critical report was uncomfortable. Academic work represents a considerable investment of time, and criticism can have real consequences for the people receiving it. I tried, therefore, to make the review detailed, evidence-based, and constructive—even where my assessment was negative. The objective was not simply to identify weaknesses, but to explain why they mattered and what would have to change for the paper’s argument to become convincing.

My first peer review did not leave me feeling that I had suddenly become an authority on everything I read. It gave me a more realistic lesson: reviewers are not invited because they possess complete knowledge. They are invited because they can offer a particular kind of informed judgment.

The responsibility is to make that judgment as carefully, transparently, and fairly as possible.

What I learned from not being shortlisted for an ‘Outstanding Individual’ award

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Sun, 17 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

I recently applied for Université Laval’s Bourse Personnalité (Outstanding Individual award). I was not selected—or even shortlisted.

Congratulations are due to the students whose candidacies were recognized. Their projects clearly made a strong impression, and being selected in a university-wide competition is a significant achievement.

The result may not be the one I had hoped for, but I do not regret applying. My candidacy was built around several years of involvement in student scholarly publishing, particularly my work as editor-in-chief of the Actes des Journées de linguistique in 2024 and 2025. The project was substantial enough that I believed I had a realistic chance. That, in itself, was a sufficient reason to submit an application.

Editorial work as student involvement

My application focused on the work required to improve the production of the JDL conference proceedings: coordinating authors and editors, carrying out developmental editing, managing the publication platform, and trying to make the process faster and more predictable. For the 2024 proceedings, six articles were published before the end of the conference year, and the nine-manuscript volume was completed by May 2025. I then returned as editor-in-chief for the 2025 volume.

Editorial work often succeeds by disappearing into the final product. When an edited volume is published, readers see the finished articles. They do not see the exchanges with authors, the restructuring of manuscripts, the technical problems, or the many small decisions required to keep a volunteer publication project moving.

Looking more closely at previous recipients

One lesson from the application is that the formal eligibility criteria do not necessarily reveal which kinds of candidacies are most competitive.

Competitions develop their own culture over time. The students recognized in the Personnalité category at the 2025 Gala de la vie étudiante provide a useful illustration.

Their involvement included establishing shared refrigerators on campus, relaunching an association supporting sexual and gender diversity, creating free clothing assistance, representing international students, organizing interprogram activities and charitable fundraising, offering public-speaking courses, and founding a radio program devoted to legal and cultural issues.

These are varied and clearly worthwhile forms of involvement. They also share qualities that make their effects comparatively easy to see and communicate: identifiable communities, public activities, concrete services, and an immediate social dimension.

The contributions of editorial work are distributed and slow to surface. They improve manuscripts, support student authors, preserve student research, and strengthen part of the university’s scholarly infrastructure. That kind of impact is genuine, but it may not be the easiest to evaluate in a competition where a clear social narrative helps a candidacy land.

This does not indicate a flaw in the selection process. It does, however, reveal something useful about the culture of the competition and the kinds of achievement it has tended to recognize.

Understanding that distinction is not a reason to be discouraged. It is a reason to go in with accurate expectations.

Apply—but be strategic with your time

None of this changes my view that the application was worth making.

It is easy to disqualify oneself in advance, particularly when a competition is selective or when one’s work does not resemble the most visible examples of student involvement. An applicant does not need to know that they will win. They need only have a credible case and a realistic possibility of being selected.

At the same time, applications require time, and academic work already involves constant decisions about where that time is best spent. The profiles of previous recipients can help with that decision. They reveal not only who has succeeded, but also which forms of involvement a competition is especially well suited to recognize.

That kind of research is worth doing before you commit to an application—not to talk yourself out of applying, but to go in with accurate expectations and to make an informed decision about whether the opportunity is well matched to your work.

The criteria tell you whether you are eligible. Previous recipients’ profiles help you judge whether preparing the application is a smart use of your time.

Taking a backseat at JDL 2026

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

I remain on parental leave. This post documents an ongoing project, a completed milestone, or occasional preparation for the next stage of my research.

The Journées de linguistique have been an important part of my academic life at Université Laval. I have helped organize the event, worked on the proceedings twice, reviewed submissions, coordinated editorial work, and spent a great deal of time thinking about how the JDL can be useful to students and early-career researchers.

That work matters. A student conference is not just a line on a CV, and it is not just an annual event that needs to be kept alive. At its best, it is a space where people can try out ideas, receive serious feedback, learn how academic publishing works, and see themselves as part of a research community. That is worth protecting.

But for JDL 2026, I need to take more of a backseat.

Part of the reason is practical. For me, 2026 has to be a year where my newborn son and doctoral work come first. I am at a point in my PhD where I need to be more selective about how I spend my time. My thesis, my articles, my research data, and the next stages of my academic file need more attention. Service work is valuable, but it can expand very easily. It often becomes the kind of work that is urgent, visible, and never quite finished.

There is also a broader reason. I do not think this type of position should be held for too long by the same person.

For the 2026 proceedings, Alejandro Fallas Godínez will take on the role of incoming editor-in-chief. I am very happy about that. Alejandro brings his own strengths, priorities, and way of working to the project, and that is exactly what the JDL needs. A healthy collective project should not simply reproduce the habits of the person who happened to be most involved in the previous cycle.

When one person remains central to a project like the JDL for too many cycles, even with good intentions, the project can start to reflect that person too strongly. Personal preferences can start to look like institutional norms. What begins as care for the project can slowly become overcontrol. And because you become more efficient, it can also lead to a ratchet effect, as we pointed out in our 2025 editorial.

That is not healthy for the JDL.

The JDL should not depend on one person’s habits, standards, taste, or availability. It is a collective project, one that has been alive since 1987. It should continue to be shaped by different cohorts, different priorities, different styles of organization, and different ideas about what a student conference can be. Continuity matters, but so does renewal.

Taking a backseat does not mean disappearing. I still care about the event, and I still want it to succeed. I am happy to offer advice, share documents, explain past decisions, and help make the transition easier. But I do not want to be the person through whom everything has to pass.

That is better for me, and I think it is better for the JDL.

A collective project has to remain collective. Sometimes that means stepping forward. Sometimes it means stepping back.

Going on paid parental leave during a PhD

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Going on paid parental leave during a PhD

I am about to go on paid parental leave.

That sentence feels simple, but in the context of a PhD it carries a surprising amount of weight. Doctoral timelines are often imagined as linear: coursework, exams, data collection, analysis, writing, defence. Even when everyone knows that life is more complicated than that, the imagined shape of the degree still tends to be uninterrupted. Progress is measured in milestones, submissions, chapters, articles, conferences, and deadlines.

A child does not fit neatly into that calendar.

Georges arrived earlier than expected, and his first year has changed the rhythm of my doctoral work in ways that are difficult to summarize. There have been hospital memories, appointments, paperwork, fatigue, joy, worry, and then the ordinary, repetitive, beautiful work of caring for a baby. The thesis has continued in the background, sometimes steadily and sometimes not. But it has no longer been possible — or desirable — to pretend that doctoral research exists outside the rest of life.

This is why paid parental leave matters.

Through the Tri-agency award-holder rules, a SSHRC doctoral award can be interrupted for paid parental leave. In administrative terms, this is a policy about award interruptions, eligibility, primary caregiving, and stipend payments. In human terms, it means that I can pause my doctoral funding and step more fully into caregiving without treating that pause as a rupture or a personal failure.

I find that important.

Graduate students are often encouraged to think of funding as recognition: a sign that a project is promising, that an application was successful, that a student has demonstrated potential. That is true, but it is incomplete. Funding is also infrastructure. It is one of the things that makes research materially possible. It pays rent. It buys time. It protects continuity. And, in this case, it creates room for a doctoral student to become a parent without the entire structure of the degree collapsing.

I am grateful for that.

I am also aware that going on leave produces its own complicated feelings. Part of me is relieved. Part of me is anxious about stepping back from a project that already feels too large and too delayed. Part of me worries about losing momentum. Another part of me knows that the language of “momentum” can become cruel when applied to care work, illness, birth, prematurity, and family life.

There is a strange tension here. On paper, parental leave is an interruption. But in reality, it is not an interruption of life. It is life. The administrative system pauses the award so that caregiving can happen, but the broader work of becoming a researcher does not simply stop. I suspect this year will shape how I understand academic work, institutional support, and the hidden conditions that make scholarship possible.

I do not know exactly what returning will look like. I know there will be data to collect, articles to write, collaborators to update, and timelines to revise. I know I will probably return with some frustration about lost time. But I also hope I will return with a clearer sense of what kind of academic life I want to build: one that does not depend on pretending that care is peripheral to serious work.

For now, I am trying to accept the pause as legitimate.

Not as a detour from the doctorate, and not as an apology.

As part of it.

Passing my second doctoral examination

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

I am very happy to share that I have passed my second doctoral examination.

This marks an important milestone in my PhD. The examination was based on a substantial written document of about 70 pages, in which I presented the current state of my doctoral project, its theoretical and methodological foundations, and the next stages of the research.

I am especially grateful to the members of my committee, who agreed to evaluate the document within a tight timeline before I began parental leave. I know that reading and assessing a long doctoral examination document requires a significant investment of time and attention, and I truly appreciated their generosity, availability, and constructive feedback.

With this second examination completed, the project is now moving more fully into the thesis research phase. The next steps include continuing work on the scoping review, advancing the empirical components of the thesis, and preparing for the next stages of data collection and analysis.

It feels good to reach this point. Doctoral work is rarely linear, and this milestone represents not only the completion of a program requirement, but also a clearer sense of where the project is going.

Return to France postponed

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 04:00:00 GMT

I had planned to return to France in January 2026 to continue my doctoral work at the Université Grenoble Alpes with Olivier Kraif, my co-research supervisor. Instead, that return will have to wait.

Our son, Georges Auguste Dulude-McKee, arrived much earlier than expected - 2.5 months, to be exact. (He’s doing okay, but he won’t be released from hospital untill around his original due date) His premature birth has reshaped the past several months—and, unsurprisingly, our plans for the beginning of 2026.

Postponing the trip was not a difficult decision. A research stay abroad always requires a certain amount of coordination. Travelling with a very young baby requires considerably more. Travelling with a baby who arrived prematurely, and whose first months have involved additional medical care and follow-up, is another matter altogether. Returning to France in January is therefore neither realistic nor desirable for us.

My doctoral work remains important, and I still intend to spend time in Grenoble as part of my co-supervision. But the timetable must now accommodate the needs of our family rather than the other way around.

For the moment, that means remaining in Québec, adjusting to life as a family of three, and giving Georges the time he needs to grow stronger.

The JDL 2024 conference proceedings are now complete

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:00:00 GMT

The publication of the 2024 Journées de linguistique conference proceedings is now complete.

Conference proceedings collect written articles developed from presentations given at a conference. In the case of the Journées de linguistique, they provide student and early-career researchers with an opportunity to transform a presentation into a formal academic publication and to gain experience with peer review, revision and editorial production.

I served as editor-in-chief of the 2024 proceedings and oversaw the project from the initial submission and evaluation stages through revision, production and publication.

The work continued until August 2025, but the articles were not held back until the entire collection was ready. Instead, we used a rolling publication model: each manuscript was published as soon as it had completed the evaluation, revision and production process.

This allowed six manuscripts to be published before the end of December 2024. By May 2025, nine manuscripts were available, even though the remaining administrative and editorial work on the project continued into August.

A different timeline for the proceedings

This publication schedule represents a significant departure from the recent history of the Journées de linguistique proceedings.

Across the previous twelve years, the average interval between the conference and the publication of its proceedings has been approximately five years. Some volumes appeared more quickly, while others required considerably longer.

These delays are especially consequential for a student conference. A proceedings article may be an author’s first academic publication. When it appears several years after the original presentation, the author may already have completed their degree, moved to another project or left academia.

The goal was therefore not simply to complete the collection more quickly. It was to make each article available while the work was still current and while the publication could still contribute meaningfully to the author’s academic development.

Publishing manuscripts as they become ready

A proceedings collection can easily become dependent on its slowest manuscript. Under a traditional volume-based model, an article that is completely ready may remain unpublished until every other contribution has completed peer review, revision, copy-editing and production.

Rolling publication avoids that bottleneck.

The manuscripts in the 2024 proceedings did not all progress at the same pace. Some authors completed their revisions rapidly, while other texts required additional rounds of work. Publishing articles individually meant that these differences did not delay the entire collection.

By the end of 2024, six manuscripts had already been published. Three more followed by May 2025. The broader editorial project was then formally completed in August.

A collective editorial project

Although I coordinated the proceedings as editor-in-chief, the project depended on the work of many people: authors who revised their texts, reviewers who provided evaluations and members of the editorial team who helped manage the manuscripts through the publication process.

I am particularly grateful to my coeditors, Nicolas Gignac and Linda Wong, for their help throughout the project. Their contributions were essential to keeping the editorial process moving and bringing the proceedings to completion.

Conference proceedings involve a great deal of work that remains largely invisible once the articles appear online. Manuscripts must be assigned, evaluations tracked, decisions communicated, revisions checked and final files prepared, often while everyone involved is also managing research, teaching and other academic responsibilities.

Completing the project in August 2025—after publishing six manuscripts in 2024 and nine by May 2025—shows that the Journées de linguistique proceedings can operate on a timeline measured in months rather than years.

Letter of thanks for a short-term research stay in Grenoble, France

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Originally written as a letter of thanks to the anonymous donor whose support made this short research stay possible.

Dear donor,

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the expression Zoom apéros — or “Zoom happy hours” — quickly became part of everyday life, referring to virtual gatherings with friends that tried to make up for the absence of shared moments in person. The fact that both the expression and the practice largely disappeared after lockdowns were lifted says something important: nothing truly replaces the richness and ease of face-to-face exchange. Thanks to your generous support, I was able to experience this firsthand.

The travel award gave me the freedom to travel to Grenoble, France, for a training stay in June, where I met my research co-supervisor in person for the very first time. My meetings with Olivier, a computer science specialist at Université Grenoble Alpes, helped us develop a genuine working relationship, one that will support a lasting collaboration. They also opened up new avenues of reflection that no video call could have sparked in quite the same way.

I also have wonderful personal memories of the stay, including discovering sérac, a fresh cheese from the foothills of the French Alps, which I warmly recommend to anyone visiting the region.

I am therefore deeply grateful for your commitment to supporting emerging researchers, and for making my first in-person meetings with my co-supervisor possible.

With sincere gratitude,

Gabriel Frazer-McKee SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in Linguistics Specialist in neology in Quebec French Université Laval

Memory from an excursion to Chamrousse, in the French Alps, with my co-supervisor Olivier and my fellow doctoral students Rim and Ola, after a productive week of work in Grenoble. The fresh mountain air offered a welcome contrast to the stifling heat of the city, aptly nicknamed “the Bowl.”

Three weeks in Grenoble, France

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

After the ENEOLI Training School in Lisbon, I am spending three weeks in Grenoble for a research and training stay connected with my doctoral project. The visit is especially significant because it is my first opportunity to meet my co-supervisor, Olivier Kraif, in person.

Although Olivier and I have been working together remotely, meeting in Grenoble makes it possible to discuss the project in greater depth and to work through methodological questions more naturally. Our conversations are helping me clarify several aspects of the scoping review and think more concretely about the computational components of the thesis. They are also opening new directions for our longer-term collaboration.

The final week of the stay is devoted to an online course offered by Utrecht University on AI-aided systematic reviewing. I am following the course from Grenoble and learning to use ASReview, an open-source tool that combines active learning with human screening decisions to prioritize records during evidence synthesis.

This training comes at an ideal point in the project. The searches for my scoping review have produced tens of thousands of potentially relevant records, making an efficient and transparent screening strategy essential. Over five intensive days, the course covers the principles behind active learning, the practical use of ASReview and the methodological decisions involved in integrating machine-assisted screening into a review.

The stay has also provided time to discover Grenoble and its surroundings. Olivier has introduced me not only to colleagues and research environments at Université Grenoble Alpes, but also to places such as the Charmant Som and the oak of Venon. These excursions have made the visit both scientifically productive and personally memorable.

The three weeks have confirmed the value of spending time in the same place as one’s collaborators. I am leaving Grenoble with a stronger methodological foundation for the review, several new research ideas and a much more concrete sense of the collaboration that Olivier and I are building around the thesis.

Neology Training School

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

From June 9 to 13, 2025, I attended the first ENEOLI Training School on Lexical Innovation, held at NOVA University Lisbon. Organized through the ENEOLI COST Action network, the school brought together doctoral students, researchers, and professionals interested in neology and its connections with lexicography, terminology, sociolinguistics, language planning, and translation.

It was an unusually good fit for my doctoral research. Although my work focuses primarily on the factors associated with the diffusion—or disappearance—of neologisms, studying lexical innovation requires engaging with a much broader set of questions: What exactly counts as a neologism? How can new words and meanings be detected in corpora? When should they be included in dictionaries or terminological resources? How do social and cultural conditions influence their emergence and circulation?

The school approached these questions from a different perspective each day. We began with the basic concepts and categories used to describe neology before turning to its relationship with lexicography, terminology, sociolinguistics, and technology. Morning sessions introduced the theoretical foundations of each area, while the afternoons were generally devoted to practical exercises involving real linguistic data.

This combination was one of the program’s main strengths. The training covered not only conceptual distinctions but also the practical work required to build resources, extract neological candidates, document new lexical units, and present the resulting data. We were introduced to tools and resources including TermoStat, FAIRterm, ParlaMint, Sketch Engine, Lexonomy, and Wikibase. Even when a particular tool did not correspond directly to my own research design, seeing how other researchers operationalize and process lexical innovation helped me situate my methods within the wider field.

I was particularly looking forward to the session led by Kris Heylen and Uri Horesh on neology in cultural and social contexts. Its emphasis on language contact, lexical borrowing, sociolinguistic variation, and cultural change connected closely with my interest in the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that shape neological diffusion.

Unfortunately, Lisbon intervened.

The evening before the session, a bicycle courier ran over my foot. Nothing was broken, thankfully, but by the following morning my foot was so badly bruised that I could not even hobble well enough to attend. Missing one of the sessions most closely related to my own work was frustrating, although I was mostly relieved that the accident had not caused a more serious injury—or ended the week altogether.

Beyond the individual courses, the training school offered something that can be difficult to obtain when working on a highly specialized doctoral project: a view of neology as a genuinely international and interdisciplinary research area. The same basic phenomenon—lexical innovation—can be approached as a question of linguistic structure, dictionary-making, terminological management, technological infrastructure, social variation, or language policy. Each perspective brings its own concepts, methods, and assumptions.

The week in Lisbon therefore gave me more than a collection of techniques. It helped me better understand where my own research sits within the field, what it shares with neighbouring traditions, and where those traditions sometimes speak past one another. It also provided an opportunity to meet researchers working on similar questions in different languages and institutional contexts—the kind of contact that can lead to conversations and collaborations long after a training school has ended.

Even with one bruised foot and one unfortunately missed session, the first ENEOLI Training School was an important and timely part of my doctoral training.

Filming the 2025 Journées de linguistique

Gabriel Frazer-McKee — Tue, 20 May 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Organizing a conference involves considerably more than selecting abstracts and preparing a schedule. For the 2025 Journées de linguistique, I also took responsibility for filming six of the presentations and producing the finished videos. This year, I approached the task with something closer to a small professional production set-up than the usual camera-at-the-back-of-the-room arrangement.

The core of the system consisted of two Sony cameras: an FX30 and a ZV-E1. One provided a stable wide or medium shot of the speaker and presentation area, while the other offered a closer angle. Having two perspectives made it possible to introduce some visual variation during longer presentations and to cut away when someone crossed in front of a camera or a speaker moved outside the expected frame.

I am interested in learning how to film and edit well for reasons that extend beyond the conference itself. Video is becoming increasingly useful in teaching, whether for producing short explanations, demonstrating concepts, creating asynchronous material, or presenting course content in a more visually engaging form. Recording the Journées de linguistique gave me an opportunity to develop those skills through a real project with real constraints.

The most important improvement over the previous year was the addition of Deity TC-1 timecode boxes. These kept the cameras and the external audio recordings on a shared clock, allowing the files to be synchronized automatically during editing.

The difference was substantial. The year before, I had recorded presentations using an FX30 and a cellphone. Because the two devices did not share timecode, I had to synchronize every clip individually using the recorded audio. For a single clip, this was manageable. Across several presentations, however, aligning the files one at a time took hours before the actual editing could even begin.

With synchronized timecode, the clips from both cameras and the corresponding audio could be assembled almost immediately. There were still occasional adjustments to make, but the most repetitive part of the process had largely disappeared. The timecode boxes did not make the finished videos look dramatically different on their own; their value was in making the production workflow far more efficient. Across the six presentations, they saved hours of work.

Audio remained the most important part of the recordings. Viewers will generally tolerate an imperfect camera angle, but they will not continue watching a presentation they cannot understand. The cameras were therefore only part of the system. The speakers’ microphones and the room audio also had to be captured clearly and incorporated into the synchronized workflow.

The set-up was probably more ambitious than strictly necessary for a student conference. It also occupied an awkward middle ground. This was not a television crew or a fully staffed professional production, but it was considerably more involved than placing a single camera on a tripod and pressing record. “Semi-professional” seems like the most accurate description: professional equipment and methods, operated on a limited scale by someone who was simultaneously helping to run the event.

Filming six presentations still generated a considerable volume of footage. Each talk had to be reviewed, edited, titled, and exported. The two-camera set-up nevertheless made the videos easier to shape, while timecode removed one of the most laborious stages of the previous year’s workflow.

There is also a longer-term value to doing this properly. Conference presentations are often ephemeral: they take place once, in one room, for the people who happen to be present. A clear and carefully edited recording gives the presenters’ work a life beyond the event itself. It also creates a record of the conference and of the research being carried out by students and early-career scholars at this particular moment.

The six completed presentations are available as a YouTube playlist.

The finished videos required a significant investment of time, but the process was much more efficient than it had been the year before. Just as importantly, it gave me practical experience with a form of communication that I hope to incorporate more deliberately into my teaching.