Relle

I mentioned this on Plurk a while back, but to explain in a bit more detail: For my final project in my linguistic anthropology class this term, I am writing a 12+ page paper analyzing how people talk on Plurk. (Specifically I'm writing about how the medium utilizes paralinguistic devices, which basically means how people convey the same emotional content with their speech when they can't see or hear each other. There is going to be a lot about emoticons, let me tell you.) In order to do this, however, I'm going to need a bunch of examples of people talking on Plurk. So what this entire post boils down to is: people on my timeline, are you okay with letting me use things you say on Plurk in my paper?

What will happen if you say yes is that I'll include stuff you say in my pool of potential data; it doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to use it in the paper, since I'm going to have to pick out the examples that best demonstrate my points. Once I decide for sure what data I'm using in the paper, I'll let people know. The paper itself is really only going to be read by the professor, the TA, and maybe two or three people from my class who help peer edit -- so not a lot of people, is my point here. I'm also planning to use people's display names rather than their usernames, so hopefully no one will be too identifiable. Please make sure you're totally comfortable with everything I'm describing in this post before you give permission, though, I really want to make sure everyone is cool with this and doesn't feel forced into it or anything.

As part of the project, I also have to make a 3-minute podcast that basically summarizes the content of the paper. The podcast will include some of the data examples (i.e. quotes from people on Plurk) in it, but not as many as the paper; it will, however, be heard by my entire class, which is about 30 people, and they will probably actually be paying attention. Since I have to get text quotes into a podcast, I'm also planning to recruit a few people to help me out further by doing dramatic readings of some quotes out loud; there's a separate question about this at the end of the poll.

So, poll! Because this is the easiest way I can think of to keep track of all of this stuff. For the record, I'm only going to go through Plurks from October and November of this year for data; I'm not going to use things from last year or anything. I also will not use anything from private plurks because that would be dickish. If you would also prefer me to not use anything from plurks with a certain tag or something I can do that, just leave a comment here saying so since that's a bit hard to put in the poll.



If you have any other questions at all about what any of this entails, you can bug me either here or on Plurk. Thanks for taking the time to read through this, and hopefully help me out!