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Dear M-O Jiscmailers,
Am I right - has there been a resounding silence in response to Bob's email?
I don't want to mediate between researchers and M-O correspondents but I
do hope that some discussion can get going.....
I am very fond of Bob AND Kaeren who is one of the authors of the paper Bob
is criticising nd I think they both make good points. I think it would be
great if the researchers and the M-O writers had a dialogue so please join
in!
Bob's email is very long so I won't comment point by point at this stage
but I do want to respond to his questions about how much the researchers
know about the M-O writers:
It is true that the only biographical information made publicly available
by us on our database printouts about the correspondents are: male/female,
date of birth, marital status, place of residence and occupation.
Researchers also have access to the biographical info forms where people
give more detailed information about their work and their partner's work
(if relevant) and their living arrangements. In addition nearly all
correspondents give a mini biog at the top of every response to a
directive.
Researchers can glean a lot of information from these sources although many
of them tell us that they would like to have more information about social
class, ethnic origin etc. We shall be discussing this issue in our next
directive with the current Mass-Observers. As you all know I am keen to
avoid imposing too many structured questionnaires on correspondents which
compel them to put themselves in boxes. The whole notion behind the
current project is to leave people free to describe themselves in ways they
feel are relevant and not in the terms expected of them by researchers.
However, in order to evaluate the material as social evidence (especially
when comparing M-O to other forms of evidence - opinion polls for example),
researchers do need some demographic information.
Asa result it IS possible for researchers to glean a great deal about the
correspondents , (maybe not conclusively) from the texts of directive
replies and it IS TRUE that (for various reasons we could continue to
discuss) the great majority of M-O correspondents are FEMALE, over 50 and
from what we might crudely call "White collar" or middle class backgrounds
and PROBABLY very few people of Asian or Afro-caribbean origin.. NOT ALL of
course and Bob does NOT fit this category at all. We would like to recruit
a wider range of people, certainly more younger people if we can, and more
men..... but we also need to recruit people from outside the south. This is
what Sandra and I are working on as we speak.
INTEXTUALITY
Finally on "intertextuality" which Bob asked about: this is a bit of
academic jargon, Bob, part of the academic "trade" and in my New Fontana
Dictionary of Modern Thought there is an entry. The first sentence reads "A
term coined by Julia Kristeva in an essay in 1966 to describe the necessary
interdependence that any literary text has with a mass of others which
preceded it". Julia Kristeva is a French feminist philosopher. You get a
lot of intertextuality in films when new film makers consciously use
devices, scenes, dialogue etc from older films for dramatic effect. Also in
adverts... but maybe our academic jiscmailers would like to come in on
this?????
And now it's time to go to work so over to you all
Dorothy
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