Maybe she can help me then...
I want to say "Who cares?", but in a devastating sledgehammer to the forehead sort of a way. I've ruled out:
"So what?"
"BFD"
"No one f*cking cares"
"What a complete waste of three years"
Any suggestions?
British boffin named first ever 'doctor of texting'
A student at a British university has been awarded the first ever PhD in text messaging. Linguist Caroline Tagg - now Dr Caroline Tagg - spent more than three years at Birmingham University researching the subject of text messages and the language used within them. She trawled through 11,000 text messages sent by 235 people …
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:06 GMT Adam Salisbury
WTF??
PhD in text messaging, well there you go Uni students, parents of Uni students and those who can't afford Uni; extortionate tution fees are entirely justified to create these pinnacles of educational excellence. Without groundbreaking achievements like these some people may have their feelings hurt upon the realisation that they can't do a real degree.
Mine's the one with the bachelors degree for colouring in and dribbling in the pocket
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:06 GMT Darren 4
She must be book!
I'm glad to see that in these tight times, my taxes are being put to good use. What the HELL sort of Doctorate it that;
"Yes I'd like the job of head on Linguistics please... my qualifications, well I have this Doctorate in Texting... W-Why are you laughing??"
This is how I forsee every job interview she will ever take. Almost as pathetic as the First degree is stand-up comedy last week. SHE WASN'T EVEN FUNNY!!!
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:06 GMT Jimmy Floyd
u no wot...?
From a decent University that, which inclines me to believe this was actually a serious piece of linguistic research and not some joke doctorate from Scumbag College (who nearly beat Footlights College, Oxbridge on University Challenge dontchaknow).
Bugger. Have I seen through the implications of a carefully worded headline?! Mine's the one with a Nokia 6150 and no T5.
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:06 GMT Charlie Clark
Isn't Birmingham offering degree 2.0?
Thanks to Caroline for this nugget of wisdom:
"From her research she believes that texts are much more about maintaining and building relationships rather than passing on raw facts."
Well, fucking fancy that. Who'd have thought it? Or: the redundancy of much communication is a well-researched and understood area (in any university outside Birmingham). People send texts /twats / IRC to pretend they have real human relationships.
I hope she did a bit more that relatively trivial linguistic analysis for three years. An automatic Twat-O-Tron parser would have been useful, for a start.
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:06 GMT Martin Gregorie
Gotta use the time somehow
Well, if you consider that in the current economy, with its lack of jobs and glut of useless degrees, she'd probably have been unemployed for those three years, it was as good a use of her time as any and at least she kept her mind occupied.
I'd throw rocks at her supervisor for picking/approving the research topic and at her university for wasting a PhD degree. They don't grow on trees, you know!
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:10 GMT Bilgepipe
Wrong
“Quite the contrary from destroying the English [language], [text messaging] is actually encouraging it,”
No, it's destroying the English language, as more and more people lose the ability to spell and construct simple sentences, and more and more words become corrupted and used incorrectly.
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Monday 10th August 2009 15:10 GMT jsp
Not a complete waste of time
Next time some old fart starts ranting on about "young people nowadays" ... "modern technology" ... "desecrating the language of Shakespeare" or similar tosh in the Daily Mail or on Radio 4, at least we can tell them where to shove it in a scientific, evidence-based way.
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Monday 10th August 2009 23:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
PhD
@:
james 68
Dan 21
Hollerith 1
Darren 4
Richard 120
Ryan 1986
Steve Jones 2
Shane 8
AC 4
Richard 20
Stuart 13
Are you sure you're not the same person? looks like it from the similar sentiments shared across multiple messages and the random numbers after generic names..
Anyway, did you consider that PhDs are not government funded? You can stop crying about your taxes now.
Seriously, take your whining to dailymail.co.uk
If this is what the universities want to spent their research grants on, or indeed if the post-grad student wants to fund it themselves, then let them.
@ Dan 21 specifically:
Did you consider that there are other types of average, other than the mean? It could well be the median or mode. Or in fact, for simplicity, she may have just rounded, or been working to significant figures.
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Monday 10th August 2009 23:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Give over you lot....
Ooooh look! it's media knee-jerk time again. And you're joining in like they want you to.
It's applied linguistics, get over it. Of course the journos want a rant, they're all upset that linguistics people know how to use longer words than they do.
Dr Tagg could hardly have done her PhD on linguistic metadata schemas or we'd all be giggling about nominative determinism.
Here's a list of linguistics papers from a conference, so we can see her work in some sort of context, missing from the journalistic version.
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/CL2007/
Article 242 An Investigation of General Extenders in a Corpus of EU Parliamentary Debates, (measuring "vagueness" to you and me)
Article #304 looks promising for another hack rant. "Mapping undergraduate culture using the personal Blog" also #306, The Difficulties in Collecting a Corpus of Genuine and Simulated Suicide Notes
Now stop being peasants and don't be nasty to people like these, or they'll all go off and get nicely paid jobs with GCHQ improving datamining techniques as per the other news story today.
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Monday 10th August 2009 23:41 GMT Eddy Ito
Wha???
Ok, I have questions. I RTFA over at the telegraph
"... allows its meaning to remain in tact but..." intact? probably a typo and not on her. But still,
"People deliberately use words like this when they don't need to." Ok, stop the bus, back it up... words like what??
If this is what qualifies as Piled High & Deep on that side of the pond deez daze, you have my sympatees. Take what comfort you can from knowing it isn't any betta on dis side. Perhaps it's a good thing we're all too lazy to get jiggy, more of the same clearly isn't working.
A pint, B cuz meeza nd 1.
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Monday 10th August 2009 23:41 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
The worrying thing is...
That she's probabaly so far up her own arse she's probabaly proud of it.
The positive aspect of this is that I can't imagine her getting any respect from anyone with a proper higher education so she'll end up working in a callcentre, just like all the other idiots who went for style over substance when choosing their "cool" degrees. Either that or she'll end up working for Apple as they love a bit of style over substance.
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Monday 10th August 2009 23:41 GMT Charles Manning
Universities love these courses
"Media studies" etc. Easy to find lecturers (just ask any burger-flipper at McD). Easy to find students (lazy bastards who want a cruisy time while at university). Easy to assign homework(watch a couple of hours of TV and write a report on how many times there are food ads). Extra credits if you submit your report in text-speak or CtlC CtlV it directly from a blog, or send it in via twitter. No expensive equipment.
Degrees that actually help the economy, engineering and the like, are pretty much the opposite. Hard to find lecturers (they are all gainfully employed). Hard to find students (few have the qualifications & skills needed). Hard to assign and mark homework (need to read all those maths workings etc). Expensive equipment.
Now that many universities get their funding based on performance (measured by number of students they have, and the number of grads they crank out), no wonder they push the easy option
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Tuesday 11th August 2009 07:30 GMT Leon Prinsloo
erm...
why did she exclude the kids from 12-18, they appear to be the worst for shortening words, when my 16 year old niece sms's me, I don't bother reading it, because my head will spin trying to understand it. That is why they are saying that sms' are destroying the english language, or any language for that matter.
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Tuesday 11th August 2009 08:51 GMT Lionel Baden
spelling + grammer
Was on the train one day and this bloke was showing this woman how to send a text on her new phone
Woman: how i delete that
Man Dont worry bout spelling it does it for you
Woman: Is it ....
Jeez if i ever hear my kids talk / spell like that im gonna have to get the cane out !!!
worked for years now now corperal punishment and everything goes down the loo
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Tuesday 11th August 2009 09:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
surely...
the doctorate is in linguistics and the research was about texting... quite how someone can be the first doctor of texting is beyond me, surely there would need to be an officially accepted language of which many people actually speak/write before anyone could be even considered being an expert in it? since texting isnt actually an accepted language and its more a method whereby people cut down words in their own language into recognisable (in some cases) words short enough to be texted....
btw ... AC FTW!
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Tuesday 11th August 2009 09:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ Charles Manning. You're an idiot.
That's arguably the most ignorant post in this entire thread, which is no mean feat.
If you're so into stereotyping I'm surprised you didn't cotton onto why the students and teachers of engineering / mathematics et al are in such short supply - could it possibly be because they're all socially inept and nobody would dream of working with them? No, because tarring everyone with the same brush is a bl**dy stupid idea, especially if you've got no idea what you're talking about.
Many of those teaching Media Studies at my old university are established and critically acclaimed novelists, continue to work in the media (local newspapers, national newspapers, magazines and so on) and, judging by your post, considerably more intelligent than you.
I know plenty of engineering students who “sponged off the state” – up to and beyond PHD level, at the best universities in the country. Yes, the degrees may be seen as more useful – but the people I know that did them had a natural aptitude and pretty much never went. One specifically continued to a post doctorate level, specifically to avoid work. So get off your high horse, the type of person you appear to venomously dislike appears in all walks of life, and certainly in all walks of academia.
You can no doubt guess that yes, I studied media at university. While there I never once watched a “couple of hours of TV”, never once reported on advertising, and evidently came out of it a much more rounded person than the likes of you.
Interestingly, I also walked straight into a journalism job, earning above the average salary and yes, paying more than the average tax. So no – you didn’t “pay” for me to go to university.
As I said: small-minded, ill-informed idiot.
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"Media studies" etc. Easy to find lecturers (just ask any burger-flipper at McD). Easy to find students (lazy bastards who want a cruisy time while at university). Easy to assign homework(watch a couple of hours of TV and write a report on how many times there are food ads). Extra credits if you submit your report in text-speak or CtlC CtlV it directly from a blog, or send it in via twitter. No expensive equipment.
Degrees that actually help the economy, engineering and the like, are pretty much the opposite. Hard to find lecturers (they are all gainfully employed). Hard to find students (few have the qualifications & skills needed). Hard to assign and mark homework (need to read all those maths workings etc). Expensive equipment.
Now that many universities get their funding based on performance (measured by number of students they have, and the number of grads they crank out), no wonder they push the easy option
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Tuesday 11th August 2009 12:42 GMT Lottie
Knee Jerking
It's a PhD (or plumming, heating and drains) in Linguistics with its research being done on texting.
TBH, I figure it's not that bad an idea. Texting is becoming/ has become one of the most common forms of communication and has developed its own sets of rules regarding grammar, spelling and general compostition. I reckon there's quite a bit of intersting data one could extract from analyzing text messages.
Oh, sorry, I mean "what about my taxes, it's a disgrace, when I was at uni we only did REAL subjects like examining letters, the english language is evolving a bit and I'm going in to future shock. Why can't we go back to shakespeare and HIS made up words?"
This topic is closed for new posts.
