Thread 3: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet

They are trying to create a tool which identifies who wrote what and they used MN posts to train their LLM to do so.

This is exactly what Aston is doing. There is big money to be made for a such a tool and it is more likely to be used against society than for society (kind of like gain of function research that resulted in Covid). The academics involved know this. The excuse justification that it will be helpful to women who are victims of domestic violence or root out transphobia or whatever is just a smoke screen. Those paying for this research, those conducting it and those that stole the data for the sandbox are all complicit. Had the tool been available centuries ago, it would have been deployed against witches.

Idealistic people like ED are like gullible mugs in a multi level marketing scheme, recruited by self interested professors to stay at university far longer than their abilities would otherwise dictate.

This one
https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/forensic-linguistics/iafll-regional-conference

Thanks - this was the one I was trying to find, but intrigued by the other one posted up thread.

Interesting that Eden has still got a slot.

I wonder if they are waiting to see outcome of MNHQ questions as to whether or not she goes ahead as originally intended.

This thread and earlier threads, and related threads some how need an index or time line or something.

ie actual events, and then revelations as they happened.

Thing is, it's not just the FWR posters/board, but MNetters who have posted on the fertility and dieting boards, if I understood that Aston video correctly.

It's all MNers for any research purpose a future researcher might choose as they've scraped the entire site. So could be Relationships etc.

I assume that one set of data has received such a mauling that there is nothing further to extract, whilst the other has yet to explored fully, hence Aston's reticence to delete our data. Not their data, our data.

As for EP, I am surprised that someone has reached a PhD level of education whilst appearing to lack the necessary skills in critical thinking.

I put this on the Corpus Site Stuff thread but thought it might be worth flagging here too. Tbh, I'm not sure what to post where now if it's about the more serious stuff. The fun things are easy.

I'm not sure that this has been mentioned before, apologies if I missed it, but the 'P Murray' who sent the FoI request to Aston about the 'understanding the black box' conference talk, later submitted two others on 3/5/24.

To Manchester University about 'Ethics and data protection for the acquisition of the source material for the "Tracking the structure and sentiment of vaccination discussions on Mumsnet" journal article',
and
to Newcastle University about 'Ethics and data protection for the acquisition of the source material for the "Scoping the Priorities and Concerns of Parents: Infodemiology Study of Posts on Mumsnet and Reddit" journal article'.

Thanks again to P Murray.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/p_murray

No, actually I don't think it was. It's definitely Judith Butler's intention though.

I work in a university (STEM department) and it's highly unusual for a PhD student to present at a conference in their first year of study; they simply don't have data yet for anything "meaty" enough for a paying audience. Our students have an early stage assessment at 9 months which checks that the research is broadly proceeding as planned; this is the point at which the direction might be tweaked. For us this is often industrial sponsors not providing test samples/facilities as planned. It's not uncommon for the thesis title to change over the course of study, often becoming more specific.

I hope the Aston student can continue the PhD in some form, with proper guidance on research ethics, and a less ridiculously aggressive title.

And...

Just placemarking with my Aston related username change.

They'll never connect me to my usual username!!

Having fucked up the 1st year of your PhD is not the end of the world though, particularly if a chunk of it has been spent familiarising yourself with the general principle of the research methods you're going to be using, so you don't need to do that all over again. It just means you have to be much more efficient in the use of your remaining time, and resign yourself to the likelihood of the write-up over-running. A guy I went to university with was doing a plant related PhD, and missed the window for taking samples of the buds on the trees he was studying because they developed several weeks earlier than expected that year, so he had to wait a whole year before he could get any results.

Arguably, EP has a strong argument that the university erred. There are ways around this such that EP won't end up paying more over time if a private payer (which I doubt). Aston may even consider that they have a duty to do something because of the multiple failings missteps here: Nicci McLeod, Tim Grant and whomever passed through through the ethics review.

I suspect Aston may need to come to an arrangement about funding with whichever research council is funding EP's studentship and research.

Wasn't that Foucault's main aim?

It's horrific.

I don’t want to exist in a world where ‘consent’ has been ‘queered’!

'EP should end up with a higher quality thesis with an unbiased hypothesis and an ethically obtained data set.'

Why should Edenself be constrained by these white, male, heteronormative ideas of what a thesis should be? Gotta queer those concepts! 🤐

And just to say also that I could understand that if you were nearly at the end of your first year of your/your students PhD, and suddenly facing the prospect of it all going tits up and having to start again, you’d fight quite hard for that not to happen. However my sympathy is somewhat mitigated by the poor research hypothesis and the unethical approach to obtaining that data. I’d say to EP and Nicci that they should accept the sunk costs are sunk and the sooner they come up with something else, the better it will be for EP. EP should end up with a higher quality thesis with an unbiased hypothesis and an ethically obtained data set.

There’s obviously all sorts of back and forth going on, but I’m intrigued. If Aston has accepted whatever the MN/legal rationale was to delete the larger scrape, why didn’t that same rationale apply to the smaller one. It points to something being different about the more recent scrape. The difference could well be the recent scrape has a different “owner” of the data, or something else entirely. No doubt it will all be revealed eventually.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the university refuses to delete that recent scrape under ‘exemptions’ despite MN T&Cs, that they will defend the PhD student, and just ask EP to simply retitle their thesis. However, none of us ought to be surprised when the ‘results’ of the analysis remain the same ie MN/FWR is transphobic.

The supervisor, IMO, clearly reacted quickly and negatively to MN posters’ objection of misrepresentation, misuse of data, poor methodology, and confirmation bias, which is suggestive of being quite reflexively antagonist to criticism. Perhaps it wasn’t just Justine’s query that prompted a reaction and that even now software is used to scrape / continuously monitor MN? Whereas the Uni might assume that in 3 years time we’ll have forgotten about EP. Altogether I’m not holding out hope of any reflection, apologies or acceptance of poor research any time soon.

edited to add Justine

And if that is not commercial gain, I am not sure what is.
@Talulahalula IME academics are very good as not seeing any money that might flow in their general direction as 'commercial gain' because they're all about the furthering of knowledge and making any £££ out of it is the furthest thing from their innocent, non-capitalist brains.

I read papers on canine behaviour and training (because I am a nerd) and the number of people who sign off as having no conflicts of interest while producing research that supports the way they work in private practice outside academia is quite unnerving.

There is also the conference in June that the PhD student was due to present her research at. Her topic was removed from the programme but she's still down to present something. It's up to £450 to attend so I doubt any of us could afford to go. However, we could book a table or two at Asha's restaurant in Birmingham to join them at their conference dinner. 26th June if anyone is interested.
I've been to Asha's a couple of times. Foods expensive and nice but nothing special.

Or a sc-raped and furious viper.

Thanks for the links - interesting that the scrapping on mumsnet would have fitted in with this (or is this not the event our student withdrew from?). Quote:

" ... stylistic approaches to authorship analysis, which involve manual feature discovery at the token level, and stylometric approaches to authorship analysis, which involve the automated analysis of pre-defined feature sets at the type level. ... "

is that how they say they can identify users?

In the mean time I would have been interested in being an online scraped and furious vipers

Ooh my second mortgage is looking bigger by the day

Which suggests they are going to be discussing the corpus

Yes, It’s possible that the Eventbrite for the online version was ‘sold out’ from the off!