Thread 2: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet

[VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia]

At fewer than 20 posts left, time for part two.

Thread 1: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5057460-a-corpus-assisted-discourse-analysis-of-linguistic-transphobia-on-mumsnet

Site Stuff thread that tipped off MNHQ: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus

Yes, it’s the Fully Automated Doxing Machine Men that I’d like to question. Would prefer to do it on Zoom for the facial expressions.

Exactly. Think of the person that you are all coming after. It's absurd to be naming and ranting over someone who is just learning the ropes of their discipline.

The issue is one of consent. Research has been done into Mumsnet postings in the past, but with consent from @MNHQ and individual posters who were directly quoted.

"you all" and "ranting"?

Generalisations that might be interesting to some.

Do you have any idea how stressful it is to be a PhD student? If she has done something illegal it's on her supervisor and ethic committee's heads. That's what those roles are for.

Points that have been made repeatedly. It's almost as if you've not read the threads before making the generalisations.

I get all the others, but not Málaga Airport. Can someone plz explain?

😱 The amount of filters in that photo!

Here's video I took of you last week.

Although on reflection you DID resemble the photo of you in a tie before I started my experimental session with you!!

You clearly haven’t read the thread (nor the previous thread) if you’ve concluded that we think Eden Palmer is the cause of problem at Aston.

On one hand, i very much sympathise with the idea of getting anxious once your audience is bigger than anticipated. Everyone using your name on a forum is weirdly unpleasant - it feels personal.

On the other hand, it would've been interesting to have the parameters of the research set out clearly and to hear answers to questions.

Anyone else see AIFL and conjure up a combination of AIBU and ROFL to make 'Am I Fucking Laughing?'!?

Someone upthread mentioned that they've found other papers which have scraped MN to create a corpus and then analysed it. Here's one which is open access...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319708753_Women_are_bitchy_but_men_are_sarcastic_Investigating_gender_and_sarcasm

"The 61-million-token corpus was compiled using the free software BootCat (Baroni and Bernardini 2004), which gathers text from entire web-pages using seeds (search words). "

The word ethics is not to be found in that document.

You know how airports have 3 letter codes? Google Malaga’s code.

Yeah, you're not going to see me go after a PhD student at a low ranking university any time soon. Do you have any idea how stressful it is to be a PhD student? If she has done something illegal it's on her supervisor and ethic committee's heads. That's what those roles are for.

Absolutely I know what it is like to be a PhD student, as do many many other posters on here. I was also perfectly capable of being in that position without slandering thousands of women and accusing them of crimes. I had critical thinking ability.

If one is going to make defamatory claims of 'hate crime' - remember that women have been arrested, questioned, lost their jobs etc after similar accusations - then one can expect those who've been defamed to not be all that happy when they find out.

Just popped back on to try out new username - I see events have been eventuating? Why do I get the sinking feeling that somehow all this will be presented as ‘our’ (hive mind shared between 5 saddoes and our socks obv) fault? Sigh.

I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say. No, I haven't read the entirety of the two threads. I'm responding to the quoted post on this page (page 5 of thread two) who said that "People with questions to answer: PhD candidate, Eden Palmer" followed by a list of other people.

"You all" and "ranting" are normal colloquialism, as far as I can tell. This is a forum post, not a peer reviewed corpus study. Of course it's a generalisation, was I supposed to include percentages? But in any case I'd be happy to amend as follows, in the interest of maximal accuracy:

I notice that many posters [Redacted: you all] are implying that the PhD student is to blame and should be made publically accountable. Some are even implying that they are unsuited to be a researcher [redacted: coming after; ranting].

Just wondering how you can assess the responses of someone who admits to using sarcasm a lot.

I don't even think though that they consider calling us names like that in any way defamatory. It seems to me that transphobe is the worst thing they can think of to say about a person, but also something they fling around as though it has zero consequence. I don't know whether they consider it a serious accusation or something like calling us a bunch of stupid Karens.

at a low ranking university

Missed this 😂😂 Aston will be pleased you have so thoroughly demoted them!

Are you a student at AIFL by any chance?

And I'm really sick of FWR being called "anti-trans". Whether we identify as it or not, most of us would probably fall under the category of "agender" or another part of the non-cis umbrella (I've yet to discover what characteristics a cis woman is supposed to have). Edited to say - under the very loose definitions given by Stonewall et al, not that these are concrete.

Many of us have loved ones that ID as trans. I've seen many a trans person denounce gender as a prison. If people genuinely don't grasp that being critical of gender doesn't make you anti- anything except harmful expectations, then really you need to think a bit harder.

OK, so we are getting further here. This is a lecture from 2022, which states that the Automatic Doxxing Machine has worked on Mumsnet, and also that - if I am reading it right - that it is being used to understand if someone is posting as a feminist or a parent in a particular context.

https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/forge/2022/10/28/liu-assessing-hybrid-identities-in-online-extremist-communities-through-sociolinguistic-styles/

Side note: Lancaster much better regarded for Linguistics than Aston

Yeah, you're not going to see me go after a PhD student at a low ranking university any time soon. Do you have any idea how stressful it is to be a PhD student? If she has done something illegal it's on her supervisor and ethic committee's heads. That's what those roles are for.

I'm not sure what being at a "low ranking university" has to do with anything here. Ethics is ethics, status is irrelevant. My PhD is from a "low ranking university" but the ethical bar was high (and my supervisors, like many academics at "low ranking universities", were top in their fields).

As I said above, as Eden has only been doing this PhD since last autumn, it's highly unlikely she's even got ethics clearance yet.

Bad research does need to be challenged, and what's clear here is that mass data scraping is enabling the proposed research, and mass data scraping is considered unethical (and not supported by the ICO) and may not be lawful.

Also, legal/illegal isn't a helpful bar for research ethics as research can be legal, whilst also unethical.

Haha sorry but - it's true! They came joint 37th for Linguistics (with the University of the Highlands and Islands) in the last REFs, out of 47 UK Universities.

Of course.

Eventually, there will be some sort of statement saying that things could potentially have been done differently by Aston, but FWR are all nasty terf bitches who got what's coming to them, plus have unforgivably hounded the innnnnocent researchers who have been traumatised by the whole experience (what can you expect of a bunch of nasty, nasty transphobes).

Ta. Don't know how I missed that.

How did they get such funding? Due to their approach to ethics?