Blog experiment
A guy called Scott Nowson is doing a "blog experiment" over the summer as part of his PhD thesis. He's studying bloggers' writing styles:
I am going to be looking for trends in style, as the relate to the character of the author. By style I mean linguistic features such as those used by the stylistics community for authorship attribution, such as sentence length, word bigrams and trigrams, and parts-of-speech. And by character, I mean just that.
To do that, of course he needs data. He's asking bloggers to fill out a questionnaire and send him their May 2003 archived posts.
I found out about his "experiment" through Dan Johnson's blog. It sounded intriguing. Unfortunately, I ran into problems right at the start of the questionnaire, when I was asked to confirm that I'm a native speaker of English. I shot Scott an email:
I'm from Malaysia (in South-East Asia) and technically I'm not a native speaker of English - our national language is Malay. To further complicate matters, I'm Malaysian Chinese so I suppose you'd consider my mother tongue to be my dad's Chinese dialect. But I grew up speaking English at home so it *IS* the first language I learnt. Does that count? :)
He replied,
hmm. You grew up speaking English? Presumably you still speak English? Your English in this email seems fine to me. And I presume your blog is in English? Well, it looks ok to me. So long as it was the language your grew up speaking, and that you would say you speak it fluently, then I think you can count.so feel free to fill in the survey. :D
Which I promptly did :)
Scott, a student at The University of Edinburgh, Scotland, is still looking for participants in his "blog experiment", so feel free to participate. All data will be confidential and etc., etc. He has a blog himself - "It's my getting into the spirit of my medium," he says - and I found out that he doesn't link to any participating bloggers because of the confidentiality clause. Which I thought was kinda strange, but he told me he'd promised that identities & data would be kept confidential, and he's gonna stick to that. I like that integrity, and the humour I see in his writing - I hope the blog lasts beyond the experiment, Scott! :)
For more information on the "blog experiment", visit his homepage.