Connecting the United Association of Language Studies

Website Renewal Update (June 2021)

Established in 2010, the United Association of Language Studies (UALS) celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. Upon this occasion, a proposal was made to update the website as a way for member associations to actively exchange information and strengthen our networks. Our goal is to create an easy-to-use website that is colorful and dynamic, includes videos and images, and conveniently publicizes the events of affiliated members. Additionally, we hope it becomes a place where members can easily participate in discussions through social networking services.

Now that the new UALS website has gone live, we would like to ask all member associations to consider the following:

1) Please Visit
Up until now, the most visited page on the site has probably been the Academic Event Calendar. However, the new website now contains much more information. For example, there are YouTube videos from the recent symposiums and posters from past symposiums.

2) Update Us
As before, whenever you hold an event, please share that information with us. After the event, we encourage each member association to add image files and/or videos. However, when a posting has been flagged as inappropriate by a visitor, at the discretion of the Steering Committee that posting may be removed or you may be asked to edit it. Therefore, before creating a new post, we would appreciate it if each member association would obtain the consent of anyone appearing in videos or image files.

We believe that seeing the activities of the other member associations through videos and photos will inspire all of us.

Thank you for your cooperation. We look forward to your active participation.

Background
The UALS website (WS) renewal plan was first proposed at the 2020 Steering Committee meeting (July 5, 2020). At this meeting, the Committee decided to seek opinions from all member associations. At the General Meeting (October 11, 2020), discussion of the proposal was positive, with some members further proposing a focus on the exchange of information among members. Based on this discussion, the current proposal was approved by the Second Steering Committee (November 3, 2020). After this decision, the “WS Renewal Project” was launched, and five working group (WG) members were selected from the member associations of the Steering Committee. The WG collected competitive quotes from a wide range of web design firms. After careful examination and assessment of proposed estimates, the final vendor was selected (February 15, 2021).