Sourcing some outside reading...

After commenting on one of our previous posts, it was made known to us that my AST, Mel Evans, had some relevant reading that she offered us to use for our project. We communicated via email to arrange when and where I could pick up the material.

To adhere to ethical issues, I asked Mel's permission as to whether she would mind me posting our correspondance on the public blog.

Minutes for Meeting No.5

Today our group had our fifth, relatively brief, meeting (moved ahead of the original date to make it easier for those with other commitments on Tuesday). We had decided over the last couple of meetings which members of the group were going to find/supply the various texts to be used in our investigation, and today we exchanged these so everyone had a copy of each letter.

 

This means we can now each analyse all of the texts for our given area: Jodie for grammar, Jordyn for pragmatics, Lauren for social context, Meg for lexis and Olivia for Phonology. Once we have each analysed the texts thoroughly in our designated area, we will each write our findings up in the form of an essay ( around 1000 words each).

Deadlines we set ourselves today, and future meetings we have organised:

• Our group will next meet on the 4th of November in the library to draw together a summary of what we have achieved so far and what we hope to achieve in the upcoming weeks. We will then post this on our blog.
• Following this, we will have another group meeting on the 9th November. This is the deadline we have set ourselves to have completed a draft version of our essays by, giving everyone around two weeks to get their piece completed. We then intend to come together to edit and combine our essays to make a single essay to be used in our final presentation. In order to conduct thorough analysis, each member of the group will also find  a piece of literature on their given area (and possibly the subject of love letters in general), and we hope to combine and discuss our thoughts about these at this meeting, writing them down to create our literature review.

Problems we have faced this week

• We have experienced some difficulties in obtaining letters from family members far away, meaning it has been more difficult for some group members to get hold of their data than for others. This has been overcome though, with the use of email and phone-calls, so hasn't affected us being able to continue with our work in any way!
• All of our group members have prior arrangements on Wednesday the 24th October, meaning none of us are able to attend the face-to-face session with our module leaders to discuss our progress. Thanks to Jodie who took it upon herself to email the module leaders to arrange an alternative time for us to meet with one of them :)

"A clear and tidy set is a dirst step towards a thorough analysis: once we have a rough idea what is going on, it is much easier to investigate individual issues further."

(Rasinger 2008: 109)

Meeting No.3 Minutes

RSEL Meeting Number 3: Minutes

In today’s meeting, we used headers to structure the discussion and come to clear decisions on what our next progression is. Below is a written form of our discussion.

 

 

What is the question?

What linguistic changes are apparent when comparing love letters from eras between the 16^th century and modern day?

 

 

What time periods will our data derive from?

Our first letter will be from the 16^th century and is an exchange between King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Letter number two will be from the early 1980s from a man to his bride-to-be the week before their wedding. The third letter is from the 1960s and is a correspondence sent during a long-distance relationship from Manchester to London. The fourth letter is from Ludwig van Beethoven to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. This letter is not provided with a year, but it is assumed that it was written between 1790 and 1827. Finally, we have a modern day email/blog from a man in Afghanistan to his girlfriend back home in England.

 

 

What aspect of language will each person in the group focus on?

Jodie – Grammar

Jordyn – Pragmatics

Meg – Lexis (with a sub-heading of vocatives)

Lauren – Social Context

Olivia – Phonology

 

 

What do we need to do before the next meeting?

• We have agreed that we will each make 5 copies of our excerpt so that we can all do our own analysis on the sheet.
• We need to try to find books in he library or online that can be used in the literature review.
• We must consider ethical issues (although this can be done together in our next meeting).

 

 

Notes:

After annotating the data, we will create a literature review.

We have also decided not to do the video recordings as part of our research so that we have time to focus on other, more important, aspects of the project.

NEXT MEETING: TUESDAY 23^RD OCTOBER @ 4PM

Collecting Data: How are we going to do it?

One of the first things we needed to decide was whether this was going to be assigned to one person within the group, or divided up between more of us. Upon discussion, we’ve decided that it is fair that we should all acquire at least one piece of data each, and that we are going to go through what we collect at a group meeting to refine what we intend to use.

Because we are using data that is already written, we do not need to consider when we are going to collect it, more so what we are going to collect. We have decided that Lauren will acquire the love letters sent between her grandparents, Jordyn will collect correspondence between her friend and her friend’s boyfriend in Afghanistan, Olivia will provide love letters between herself and her boyfriend, and Jodie will source some historical love letters.

Ethical Issues

Sealey (2010, p20) explains how ‘the practice of social research has... become increasingly constrained.’ This is because ‘the privacy and rights of anyone who participates in a research study’ must be treated sensitively.

Sealey (2010, p21) then goes on to explain how ‘you must usually ask people for permission to observe them.’ Although Sealey gives the examples of audio and video recording, we also need to take into consideration that we are studying private correspondences, and must acquire permission to study and indeed publish these seemingly private documents. To do this, we will write out a written form for the owner’s of the texts to sign (where applicable, as some of the historical ones may be deceased) as a way of giving us permission to use their property in our research project. Sealey also suggests that although our work will not actually reach ‘the public domain... the principles of confidentiality are the same.’ It is because of this that we will do our upmost to adhere to confidentiality regulations. Similarly, we may also consider keeping the identity of the writers anonymous to avoid any feelings of embarrassment.

If we choose to carry out our video interviews, we will have to get any participants to sign a declaration saying that they agree to be filmed and that they are not averse to having the video published and, in turn, viewed by others.

House-keeping issues

Most of our written work will be posted on the blog, so there will always be access to it if we were to lose any files. However, any files that are not posted but will still be needed will be backed up on to at least one of our USB sticks. We are also going to make several photocopies of each of our hard copy texts – if it were to get lost we will need to be sure that we will have access to another copy.

We will also keep an ongoing bibliography of our references as we go along so that we do not find ourselves with any plagiarism issues. This will be kept on all of our computers so that it definitely will not get lost. This list will be published on the blog at the end of the research project.

How are we going to present/summarise the data that we use?

An example of how to lay out data was provided in the Data Collection Virtual Lecture, where the researcher presented the name of the data and how many words it consisted of in a clear and concise table. We intend to use a similar format to provide a summary of our data. To keep things easier, we will probably number our data, rather than giving each one a long-winded name. For example, rather than ‘Love letter from Lauren’s Grandmother to Lauren’s Grandfather’ we may prefer to refer to it as ‘Love Letter 3.’ This will keep the word number down and make it easier for the reader to follow. 

Third Group Meeting - Prep

After listening to feedback from Alison, it was clear that we had several things to address.

Here are some of the topics that we are going to cover/come up with solutions for at our meeting tomorrow:

• We need to consider some of the ethical issues surrounding our study, such as whether we are going to reveal the identity of the writers of our love letters.
• We need to urgently do some background reading and start planning a literature review as soon as possible.
• We need to come up with our finalised question.
• We need to discuss how we are going to go about our textual analysis and perhaps rethink the distribution of our data - rather than each taking responsibility for one piece,  it may be more beneficial if we all have copies of each piece and are assigned a primary focus - e.g. grammar, lexis
• We also need to discuss whether our interviews are really going to be beneficial to the project.

We will update the blog with our decisions after the meeting tomorrow!

Group Proposal

Within our group, we have three Single Hons English Language students (Lauren, Jordyn and Meg); Single Hons English student (Olivia); and one Joint Honours Drama and English Language student (Jodie).

We have decided to focus our research project on the language used to convey love in correspondance between couples from various time periods. Although we will look at both the language and context of the love letters, our primary focus will be on the linguistic features used, and the pragmatics/semantics used in these texts.

After discussing the topic in depth, we have decided that it would be hugely beneficial to the project if we were to use a large quantity of primary resources - such as: letters exchanged between Lauren's grandparents in the 1960s; e-mails between Jordyn's friend and her boyfriend in Afghanistan; greetings card between Olivia and her boyfriend; as well as others sourced from literature (including the compilation 'Love Letters from Great Men', Robert Browning's Love Letter Collection) as well as researching love letters written by historical figures such as Henry VIII. These narratives will be important for analysis, but we also intend to use previous research on the topic (from academic writing and text books) to support our findings and provide us with extra knowledge on the subject.

The main areas we wish to study is the way that social context and etiquette of various eras has affected the language used in love letters; as well as how the concept of love has changed through time and whether this has had an effect on the language choices in correspondance.

Our main question will be either "A Study into the change that the language of love has undertaken through time." or something very similar - we have not yet decided on a definite question as we thought the entire group should be present to do this, but that is the general outline.

Firstly, we are going to choose 5 of the correspondances that we compile (to ensure that we each have one to concentrate on) and carry out a linguistic comparison between them. We plan to analyse them through data annotation, spider diagrams and venn diagrams to portray the similarities and differences between love letters from varying eras.

 We also plan to make a timeline to present some of our findings. These visual aids will also be backed up with an academic piece of writing (we are unsure at the moment how we are going to present this). We also need to organise our findings from past research through an in-depth literature review.

To build on the social aspect of our study, we intend to put together a video montage of the public's responses to various questions regarding the way that they communicate love through language. These are some of the questions that we are considering:

• "What do you associate with the term 'love letter'?"
• "If you had to write it, how would you tell someone how you feel about them?"
• "Have you ever sent a love letter?"

We also plan to put key words that we get from these interviews into word moodles in order to establish the things that people associate with the language of love.

On the day of the presentation, we intend to have a narrated powerpoint outlining our findings; a video montage playing; and a timeline depicting the chronological relationships between the sources that we have used; and some copies of our data for people to look through at their leisure.

Our Second Meeting

Today, all 5 of us met up at Jodie's to rethink our project idea.

 

We all came with various ideas, ready to think of something more original and challenging than our previous plan.

 

Here are some of Jodie's ideas - we discussed all of our ideas, taking into account the pros and cons of each, with particular focus on whether it was original enough, and whether there would be enough to go on.

 

As the conversation went on, we started to look at the books that I had brought from the Library. We thought the idea of how people speak differently with people they fancy would be something we could go on. In turn, we started discussing love letters. 

 

 



 

 

We decided it was a really charming idea, and that we would have plenty to go on with it. As we are a group of five girls we need lots to work on over the RSEL period.

Lauren also told us a personal anecdote of how her grandparents corresponded before they got married, which we realised we could use in a project revolving around the language of love, and how it has changed through history - reflecting social expectations and etiquette of the time.

 

We didn't have time to write our group proposal today, so myself, Jodie and Jordyn are going to meet at mine tomorrow at 1.30 to put it together and publish it. We have also arranged our next group meeting for 4.30 next Tuesday.

 

 

By next week, we will have:

• Written our group proposal
• Bought some literature on love letters (namely 'Love Letters from Great Men')
• Collecting primary data from friends and family
• Looked at relevant books in the library

 

Keeping in touch...

Sharing a few ideas before our next meeting via our Facebook thread. I was in the library looking for a book for Language Acquisition when the two books (the one above and the one below) caught my eye. I'd never really thought about how much of a relationship there is between language and sexuality - so I put the idea forward to the girls. Whether it comes to anything, we don't know yet. I got the books out though, just in case they do prove to be really interesting!

The best way to get a quick response is to send each other texts, as there is a high chance we will have our phones on us most of the time. I think this has been a really useful way of communicating with one another so far during RSEL.

A Change Of Plan

After a meeting with one of our ASTs, we have decided that we are going to come up with a different idea for our research project - something that will challenge us more, as well as being more original.

 

We have arranged to meet at Jodie's house on Tuesday at 4pm, having prepared some new ideas - the more original the better.

 

Will keep the blog updated with what we come up with!

03.10.2012

Our First Meeting...

 

In the middle of week 2, we had our first RSEL group meeting at Lauren's house. We had loads to talk about, mainly about which topic we wanted to study for our project. Some of the ideas that we came up with are shown in the scanned-in notes that we jotted down during the meeting.

 

 

 

 

We also talked over any issues that we were concerned about. We agreed that the best way to keep in touch was via text message, as not everyone could access the internet to check Facebook when on-the-go. We all exchanged numbers and agreed that if we had any issues to raise, we should text each other.

 

 

* * *

 

The first things we discussed were various ideas for our project.

 

The 3 favourite ideas were:

 

a) The use of language in social networking, potentially looking specifically at the way language is used in Tweeting. However, we decided that there wouldn't be much reading/research on this already around. We also agreed that it was probably too much of a niche area for a group of 5 of us to be developing over 12 weeks.

 

b) The use of age-specific language. Our conversation turned to anecdotes about phrases our grandmothers said (some very amusing!) and the idea was put forward that we could do some research into vocabulary that was specific to ages.

 

c) The last idea was how advertising language tends to vary depending on which gender it is aimed at. After Lauren showed us a hilarious video about advertising in women's cosmetics, we were very passionate about the subject of gender-specific language in the selling of cosmetics and healthcare. It seemed like a meaty topic, but not too wide that we would find ourselves out of our depth.

 

 

* * *

 

After coming to a group decision to pursue Idea C, we started looking up some books that may be useful on the library website, as well as on Google Books. We found several that could potentially prove useful and noted them down - deciding that it was Jodie's job to track them down in the Uni Library. We also decided on how we were going to analyse our data and research - this was through annotation of printed advertisements; transcribing television advertisements and analysing them; keeping an ongoing photo journal of gender-specific advertising that we came across in every day life.

 

Next, we started putting together our project proposal - getting about 300 words done. However, with the deadline for our Proposal looming, we decided to schedule our second meeting for Tuesday the 9th October.

 

* * *

 

For the next meeting, we decided that a number of things needed to be done. These were:

 

- We would all bring 5 printed advertisements for cosmetics - for each gender respectively.

 

- We would all look through our textbooks from last year to see if there was anything relevant to our project.

 

- We would all think of a potential question for our project title, with the intention that we would then pool all of these together and decide on the best one at the next meeting.

 

- Jodie would look for some relevant books in the library.

 

- Meg would type up an account of today's meeting (done!)

 

- Where possible, we would all start taking photos to put in our ongoing photo journals.