Agenda and Minutes of First Meeting
Agenda:
- Discuss which area of language will be used for the group research.
- Discuss what needs to be done in terms of wider reading .
- Discuss what initial research must be done to narrow down the initial ideas.
Minutes of Meeting
- It was immediately decided that the most interesting investigation would arise from choosing a project that was interesting while also being unusual.
- All agreed that "the language of internet trolls" was a good starting point for our investigation.
- Various ideas were mentioned as potential aspects of this topic that could be investigated; famous trolls, extreme or highly offensive trolling, trolling culture and regularly used terms and the lack of politeness principles and maxims to cause offense.
Follow-up
- Each participant agreed to read around the subject and investigate aspects of this topic that they found interesting before the next meeting for discussion.
I hope this is acceptable but please let me know if there is anything you would like me to add. Also, we need to consult Alison about the ethics behind this project as trolls are almost entirely anonymous and it will be impossible to request the permission of the people who send the original posts. As it is in a public domain and these people choose not to take credit for the posts is it unethical to use their data?
ReplyDeleteGood overview I think, thanks Tabby! Good point about the ethical side, we'll have to look into it.
ReplyDeleteAlso I've now added the follow gadget to the side :)
ReplyDeleteThank you for adding the gadget Kathryn.
DeleteThis is a very good start. Anonymous posts in the public domain should be ok to collect and analyse, but you're quite right to think about this aspect of the project. Think about the question(s) you want to answer.What do you want to find out that you don't already know? As you've recognised, reading will help here, including the textbook. Well done so far.
ReplyDeleteWhen certain stories have appeared in the news, and the individual's 'tweets' or similar have been publicly printed/spoken about is it okay to then use the data, including potentially the name of the individuals involved?
ReplyDeleteOr would it be better to treat all cases as anonymous in terms of naming names, and just focus on what they said?
Hayley.
This is a good point. Your focus is on *linguistic* issues, but depending on what your questions are these may well be related to wider contexts, including who's talking about whom and why. If you look at the full BAAL guidelines (http://www.baal.org.uk/dox/goodpractice_full.pdf), you'll see that this discussed in more detail there. You could use pseudonyms if necessary, but data that is publicly available is much less sensitive than that collected from more private sites.
Delete