Love, academic style
This Valentine鈥檚 Day we wanted to bring you a story about love. Lucky for everyone, we found two 糖心Vlog传媒LR students who met, fell for each other, got married, and now are co-authoring a paper together. Maybe it鈥檚 the nerd in us, but we think Ben and Annie鈥檚 story is the sweetest thing, especially when they tell it.聽
BEN: I鈥檓 a second-year聽Donaghey Scholar聽with a major in anthropology and a minor in French. 聽My focus in the anthropology department is in biological, or physical anthropology, more specifically primatology. 聽I鈥檝e done a few semesters of volunteer/shadowing at the Little Rock Zoo with the Great Ape Enrichment program, and I hope to graduate with my bachelor鈥檚 in May 2015.
ANNIE: I鈥檓 a second semester graduate student in the聽Rhetoric and Writing聽department. I completed my B.A. in Professional and Technical Writing in the Spring 2013. I currently work in the聽University Writing Center聽on campus, but I hope to be teaching at 糖心Vlog传媒LR in the Fall of 2014.
How Did We Meet? How Long Have We Been Together?
Annie: Well鈥 met Ben right after my 21st birthday. The whole thing is a really long story鈥�
Ben: I was living with my best friend at the time, who worked with Annie. 聽The funny thing is, I actually worked at the same place in a different department, but didn鈥檛 know Annie worked there as well.
Annie: Yeah, we passed like ships in the night for a few years鈥ut you know how small Little Rock is. We were bound to meet eventually!
Ben: My friend, also named Ben, invited her over one night after telling me how much I鈥檇 like her and how much he thought we鈥檇 click. 聽It took us about 10 minutes to do just that, and we鈥檝e been鈥retty much attached at the proverbial hip since then. 聽Ben was our best man at the wedding, needless to say.
Annie: Haha, yeah, I was set up! I didn鈥檛 get any background info on Ben, but when I met him I thought he was SO handsome and smart. We played a drinking game, kind of like Truth or Dare, and I dared him to kiss me! 鈥ut I asked in French 鈥�
Ben: I knew the most negligible amount of French then鈥ut I got the point. 聽I kissed her, and鈥hat was that. We鈥檝e been together for nearly eight years, married for almost four of those.
What Are Our Interests?
Annie: He ended up a French minor! I guess I got him hooked, lol. Ben also has an amazing love for humans, and was destined for anthropology, but to both of our surprise he also took to primatology like a natural.
Ben: Annie has been a lifelong adorer of language, and she also has an innate ability to write whatever she decides to write, ridiculously well.
When Did We See How They Overlap?
Ben: We鈥檝e known that our interests overlap for most of our relationship, but just never realized how they could professionally overlap until recently.
Annie: Yeah, it was sort of shocking. Early in our dating we shared a basic love of learning, music, art, pretty much tons of interests, but when we had to get serious and declare for our future professions, we were a little sad because we assumed that with him in primatology, and me in writing and language, we鈥檇 never really have an opportunity to research together, or form theories that involve both of our fields.
How Did The Project Come To Be? What is The Project?
Ben: Annie came to me with an article from her language theory course that asserted a lack of evidence for the comparison of human language systems to that of living primates.
Annie: I knew, from the past few semesters of listening to Ben talk about his research that some of the claims were outdated, and I wanted to know what he thought of the article鈥檚 ideas. I then took the information he gave me to Dr. Kleine, my professor, who suggested we co-author a paper since we had issues with the claim.
Ben: I鈥檒l be authoring our paper from the primatologist鈥檚 perspective and Annie will be authoring as a linguist. We鈥檇 like to look into treating ape communication the same way that we treat analysis of human language, if that鈥檚 possible, if it鈥檚 ever been done before.
Annie: We鈥檇 like to see if we can find ways to use studies of primates today to locate some shared, deep features in our ways of communicating. Thanks to Ben educating me about our evolutionary relationship to primates, I now think of them as our quieter cousins!
Ben: The ideas have been pouring out of us since we realized we wanted to explore this, and it looks like we鈥檝e got a whole semester鈥檚 worth of hard library research ahead of us. 聽Dr. Kleine is encouraging us to try for publication, and we couldn鈥檛 be more excited!