ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of impact through reference to the authors’ work on the development of the English Dialects App, a smartphone application aimed at engaging the public about language variation and crowdsourcing present-day dialect data. The chapter tracks the impact-focused element of the research from its origin in the earliest inception of the project to the authors’ experiences of dealing with media interest in their work. Having discussed their personal experiences of doing impact-focused research, the authors then use this as a springboard to discussing the concept of impact more widely. This discussion offers a particularly valuable perspective on the concept of impact, since it is written by a team of authors who have experience of doing impact-focused work in a context in which impact is not formally assessed.
