But you love me and my expensive anus don't you mum?

Please tell me you still love me!

Please!

I'm sorry my anus is so expensive.

I'll forego the doggy treats!

Just as long as you still love me!

Tell me you do!

You do don't you?

Woof

I think a study of the usage of the myriad words for arse from a socio-economic perspective would have more merit than Eden's proposal.,

It may be that it was going to be a PhD by publication rather than by thesis.

I think it is likely that it would be trying to define ‘linguistic transphobia’ in some way / doing some theoretical work related to this - makes the choice of data even more dubious.

It may be that it was going to do something interesting methodologically in terms of corpus linguistics(I doubt it with those supervisors) or more likely try and do something methodologically different for corpus assisted CDA.

It makes little sense for this team to be the supervisory team unless there was going to be a focus on linguistic ‘hate crimes’.

I would not expect that the research as outlined in the ethics would in and of itself be enough to write a whole thesis without some further focus on a methodological or theoretical development.

But surely the first job of the complex linguistic analysis would be to see whether it was possible to identify the 'real' opinions of the 'real' posters.

And only then to try to explore where (and indeed whether) they fit some template of 'phobic' views. There was no suggestion in anything I've read so far to indicate that that was going to happen.

Enough of behinds. I spent 5 years at uni and still can’t get over the ‘quality’ and small number of references to support the thesis.

edit: Pink News and Vice from what I recall

I, too, wondered about how this could form the basis of a PhD. However, as a linguistics graduate (a gazillion years ago now), I did assume that perhaps there was going to be some complex linguistic analysis as part of this, rather than just more straightforward analysis of the words being used. (I have no clue what that might be!)

I think you absolutely could write a PhD thesis on the rise of gender critical feminism since 2008, and locate this within broader social and political change, and also consider in the context of previous ‘waves’ of feminism (although I have an issue with the concept of waves, because the standard waves do not include much of the early twentieth century activism on maternity and antenatal care and earlier campaigns for contraception and abortion (although some of this was tied with eugenics which makes things a little murky), but that is a disgression). You do not even have to agree with GC feminism to do this, you just need an open mind and a valid approach.

I also think you could consider the role of MN in this and the way in which language is used to both create community and to organise and engage with political activism and debate and indeed, to address bad faith actors. But to have any valid comparative value, you would need to look at other media and other discussion fora, and it would also be necessary to start from an open research question and not an assumption of ‘transphobia’ (how is this defined?). You would also need to understand how the site works, its history and most importantly, have consent to use it and any material quoted from it.

At least, these are the things I would be thinking about for a PhD on MN, and I would also be thinking that Sarah Pederson (hopefully I remember her name correctly) had already staked out the territory, so to speak, so what would I be adding?

What I would not be doing is comparing women posting to extremists based on a corpus of threads and research questions which were biased from the outset whilst riding roughshod over the issues of informed consent.

I have just spent an hour on the phone trying to get my pet insurance premium down because 5 years ago my dog had an expensive operation on his anus. It appears I can’t get another company to insure him because of his op. His anus is literally costing me an extra £3 a week. I may have spoken about it on here at the time. I can’t remember. I may have used the term arsehole. Or bottom. Or arse. So you’ll have to search them all. And I may have changed his sex on this post or the post I originally posted on. So you have to search for both sexes. But I promise the increase in pet insurance bit is true.

Aston - You can have that link free.

And by the way that is what limits my sympathy for the student involved in this, because she must know just how flawed and fake her dataset is.

Unless she's really stupid and intellectually lazy, in which case she probably shouldn't have a primary degree, never mind be setting out to get a doctorate.

A thesis attempting to reach a desired conclusion using a corpus that includes material written by contrarians setting up straw men, material written by experimental AI, material written by bored posters arguing with their own socks, material written by students manufacturing quotations they can use in essays, material that can't be used because the creator has explicitly withdrawn permission.

I'm not an academic either, but I do have PhD and a few publications and I know just how much hard work went in to keeping what I wrote honest, and how rigorous the criticism was along the way. I cannot see how there is any validity in this exercise, and feel deep dismay that a discipline exists that permits - even encourages it.

I realise things have moved on but I was musing this morning and wondered how this is even a thesis proposition.

I'm not an academic but have worked in HE and most theses I've seen are like War & Peace. I can just about see how this could be an undergraduate dissertation but a PhD thesis?

Considering she's already come to her conclusion (of course she's going to conclude MN has become "more transphobic") she's going to have to do an awful lot of padding to get the word count.

I suspect a lot of that padding will be direct quotes from individual posters. I'm not sure of the implications of that.

Also, updated photo ID ready for the General Election, just wanted to keep Aston up to date for GDPR reasons:

That poster deffo has some idiosyncratic syntax!

If only Aston were scraping the posts by this OP

DSC

I suspect their scraping programs/computers/software might implode.

Merkins and merkin bunting at the ready so that we can follow in the footsteps of EM!

That's going to be one hell of a wave!

Prefer no abseiling, no supergluing bits to the furniture pls. Could we possibly manage a merkin wave?

Like a Mexican wave, only ....

If someone will do the ropes for me I don't mind a bit of abseiling.

Yeah... I'm there for the gerbil t shirt bit, the absailing... You're on your own there!

I agree that MN will need to do a site wide announcement at some point (probably an email to all current registered members as well as a forum post) but probably not until this is resolved, and it’s my impression that lawyer-y discussions are very much ongoing.

And if Mumsnet fail to stop this research project going ahead, I suspect we data ‘subjects’ will then take up the baton.

I’m quite up for gatecrashing a AIFL event wearing a gerbils t shirt, like the lesbians who abseiled into parliament (only perhaps without the abseiling).

(for the record, I would want the event to be one that features the head of the department, rather than the PhD candidate)

I believe a lot of people won’t click the thread as won’t understand the corpus meaning, I mean theres a lot to take in & I can imagine some people being confused by the scraping stuff, I think generally a lot of people won’t click on the feminism threads as can’t be arsed with the politics - I’m not having a pop about that btw I’m gender critical & have lurked here for years to keep me up to date with the latest fuckery. These are just my thoughts, things can move quickly & get forgotten about, I felt like that is maybe what some are hoping will happen. Like others have said a general announcement but I get it as like I previously said mumsnet is in a catch 22 situation as it would most likely drive people away from the site & I do think that this is the end goal to close down one of the biggest platforms that allows women to speak. Yes I should think lawyers are currently very busy, well I should hope they are.

There's also this

https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/integrity-ethics/research-integrity-policy

Which states

Any breach of this Policy will be addressed in accordance with the Research Misconduct Policy. A serious breach may amount to gross misconduct and could therefore result in summary dismissal.

Chinny reckon?

Aston University have an Ethics board, as we know, I've nrtff so don't know if this has been linked here before

https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/integrity-ethics/ethics/faqs

This page has details for three Ethics head honchos

https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/integrity-ethics

Honestly, it's a bit of a rabbit hole, there's pages and pages. If it was more than lip service I don't understand why they seem to have been caught on the hop.

Everything posters find in various places to do with data online points to the fact that Aston University are not being ethical, aren't doing things properly and are morally corrupt.

So why do Aston University think they can just steal women's words and get away with it?

I have been reading the UKRI webpages on research using online data, including social media.

The most obvious point is that it says that researchers need to abide by the regulations set by the data producers. As has been said many times, MN’s terms and conditions are very clear that data scraping is not allowed. So I would consider the UKRI pretty authoritative on what is or is not ethical, and that is a clear stumbling block for Eden. MN have asked for the dataset to be deleted; Aston have refused.

This leads to a fundamental ethical problem, that users are not aware how their data is being used because they assume such use (data scraping) is prohibited by the terms and conditions. Therefore it is not possible to argue that users consent (because they do not know). The issue of identifiably is not relevant yet, because the research does not get past the issue of consent.

There is also the question about what constitutes privacy in a forum such as MN. It seems to me recognised in writing about internet research that traditional understandings of public space do not hold in social media research - that is to say, that forum and social media is used by people who have a reasonable expectation of privacy in so far as their words will not be used for research but simply read by other users of that forum or of their social media. I think this interlinks with the consent piece - so people write for other users of MN and as such, consent for their posts to be read in this context (as well as being used within MN’s terms and conditions re copyright).

The other key problem seems to me - as others have said - is that the forum posts being used cover children and situations about children, and indeed other vulnerable groups (so additional ethical issues), and that by triangulating posts from published quotes, users may indeed be identifiable to those who know them. There is no way of guaranteeing this would not happen. I identified the mum of a friend of my DD as a poster on here by a phrase she said her son used about an exam. Knowing that anecdote, my DD would identify me on here. That’s a banal example, but it makes clear the issue.

I know I am only saying what has already been said, but what little I have read of the ethics form suggests that none of the complexities of this have been properly considered.

Very very expensive lawyers no doubt!