• Kat Gupta’s research blog

    caution: may contain corpus linguistics, feminism, activism, LGB, queer and trans stuff, parrots, London

Viva

I had my viva last week and passed with minor corrections. So I am now Dr Kat.

On the whole it was a really positive experience – I was only in there for about 1hr 45 minutes and both of my examiners said at the start how much they enjoyed reading my thesis and how creative it was. My internal examiner said at the start that it was going to be more of a chat and that’s pretty much how it felt.

Both of my examiners are experienced researchers and I think that was reflected in their examination style – they weren’t out to win their spurs but instead were really engaged with my work. They started off with a few general questions then we went through the thesis chapter by chapter. My chair was fantastic too – she was so calm and when I waited in her office after my viva while the examiners conferred she was reassuring about my performance.

I’d prepared a list of anticipated questions with bullet point responses – both viva classics and tricky things I was prepared to discuss – but interestingly, those didn’t really come up. I was most worried about Chapter 5 as that’s the most “original” (read: Kat discovers something original, goes off on a wild ride and drags the reader with them) and, I feel, my argument could have been more convincing – instead, they really liked it! There’s a section of close analysis in that chapter I wasn’t happy with and, indeed, debated taking out right until my submission date, but my external made a point of how much he liked it and would have liked to have seen more such analysis. Instead it was a section of Chapter 6 and what I’d called one of the named discourses in Chapter 7 that they paid most attention to. I’m not terribly attached to those things so explained why I made that decision, what I was trying to show and accepted their suggestions.

One of their criticisms was that I’m far too modest in my conclusion and can afford to make a much bigger deal about my research than I did. As my external pointed out, it’s a nice problem to have – rather than trying to inflate relatively minor findings, I apparently have this original, ambitious research that I can be proud of. They’re also both keen for me to publish findings and we talked a bit about publication strategies. I then left the room with the chair while they reviewed the viva, and after about ten minutes I was allowed back in to be told the result. They let me go off for a few minutes to make phonecalls, and when I got back my supervisor was there with a bottle of fizz.

I’d spent a few anxious nights googling things like “UK viva failure rates” and my friends had cheerfully shared viva horror stories (5 hour long vivas; examiners hated the thesis; examiners expounded on their theory rather than engage with the candidate’s work). While I wouldn’t say that I’d be thrilled to have another viva (at least not immediately – no offence to my examiners!), it wasn’t the traumatic experience I’d half anticipated. I’m not sure I’d go as far as my supervisor’s claim that she enjoyed hers, but I did find it rewarding to discuss my work with other people who were familiar with it and liked it.

Right, time to crack on with those corrections…

Submission

thesis

And….breathe.

So, yesterday I submitted my thesis.

My supervisor told me to take a good break before we meet to start preparing for my viva, so genuinely not sure what to do with myself now that the ever-present feeling that I ought to be doing some work has lifted!

Annoyingly I had to submit the thesis using my legal name as that’s what’s on the university’s records. I never use that name and if you try calling me that, I probably won’t respond as I’ll assume you’re talking to someone else.

Thesis in progress

Venn diagram of the thesis writing experience

I am currently trying to finish off the thesis. In a moment of despair, I decided to attempt to summarise my life in the form of a Venn diagram.

I am intimately familiar with all three of these things (admittedly, less so with “childhood”) and sometimes all you can do is make an (admittedly crappy) joke out of it.

CDA and me

It’s a busy time in the world of Kat! I finished my marking a couple of weeks ago (horror, despair, consumption of an inadvisable amount of chocolate hobnobs) and since then it’s been trying to beat my thesis into shape. Add to that family illness and a sick pet, and well. I’m sure you can imagine.

One of the things I’ve found most difficult about my thesis is reconciling a data-driven approach with theory. My instinct is to let the data guide me as much as possible rather than approaching the data with the expectation of finding something if I look at a particular, pre-selected word. On a methodological level, I’ve found looking at mutual information really useful because it shows links between words that aren’t necessarily obvious but often worth further investigation. This is especially true of the texts I’m working with. While suffrage-produced texts have been studied closely by lots of people, newspaper reporting and discussion of the suffrage movement isn’t something that’s been researched in depth. I’ve tried to let myself go of assumptions about whether or not they’ll behave like suffrage-produced texts. In some ways, letting go of the conviction that they’d be radically different is harder – every researcher wants to find something completely new, after all! However, as Lesley Hall might say, “it’s always more complicated”.

In my first year I tried to learn as much as possible about early 20th century British history so I could contextualise my data. Instead of looking at it simply as machine-readable data, I can recognise the discourse it draws upon – that of separate spheres for men and women, the effect engaging in public life was thought to have on women, ideas about who should choose a government of Empire. I’ve found evidence of these in the Times texts I work with and it’s been exciting to find these – little moments where things click into place, where the historiography and the data align. Bringing together these two fields has been rewarding and I hope my research is better for it.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and I, however, are a different story. I’m sure at one point I could do Critical Discourse Analysis – indeed, I got a 75 for a CDA essay as an undergraduate. I like the concepts underlying it – after all, recognising ideologies, examining power relations, questioning assumptions and destabilising cultural hegemony is interesting, not to mention very relevant to my research. However, I’ve realised that one of my problems lies with the nature of the texts I work with. Analysis of news discourse – things like newspapers, TV, radio – seems to rely on some assumptions about how news discourses are organised. For example, one theme that recurs in analysis of (written) news discourse is that news texts are organised by importance rather than chronologically. This means that you can read the headline and first paragraph of a news story and have a pretty good idea of what the news story is about.

Here’s a news text selected at more-or-less random. The headline, “US teen survives spear through brain” and first sentence, “A US teenager’s survival after a spear was shot through his brain is a miracle, doctors say” answer a lot of the “wh- questions”:

Who? A US teenager
What? Survived being shot through the brain with a spear; doctors say it’s a miracle.
Where? In the US

The next sentence, “Yasser Lopez, 16, is recovering after he was accidentally hit with a spear gun by a friend during a Florida fishing trip this month” answers some more of these questions:

When? This month
How? Accidentally hit with a spear gun by a friend.

Most of the key information is contained in the headline and these two sentences – you could read this much in a news in brief article and it would make sense. At the article continues, the information offered becomes more detailed and less “key” to understanding the news story. By the end of the article, we’re getting information about which part of his brain the spear passed through. Obviously this is a pretty basic analysis and looking at moves in news discourse can be much more elaborate.

However, what do you do when even these basic tenets of news discourse – that information is organised in terms of importance rather than chronologically – cannot be relied on? One of the ways early 20th century news texts are different from present day news texts is that they are often organised chronologically. In fact, quite a lot of assumptions about news discourse don’t work when it comes to these texts – after all, this was a period when printing 17,500 word Parliamentary transcripts in the Times was normal.

The style of CDA I’m going with, therefore, is not entirely news discourse analysis. And, having thought about it in the writing of this post, I’m okay with that. That a big chunk of news discourse analysis doesn’t work for me isn’t a failure on my part, but demonstrate that my texts are, once again, doing something different. This is okay, and in fact something interesting to add to my discussion of CDA.

Anyway, at the moment I’m in Leeds for IVACS. Some people are presenting using data from Old Bailey Online which sounds fascinating – historical forensic linguistics and corpus linguistics? Sounds good to me.

it lives! it liiiiiives!

I’m currently working on something that seem to have mutated out of a chapter. No, wait, that’s a rubbish description.

In Chapter 4 I examined words derived from Mutual Information for the words suffragette, suffragettes, suffragist and suffragists. Between the historical research and my data-driven categories, I identified the following categories: constitutionalist vs militant, class, geography, gender/gender roles, origins, direct action, legal and prison, proper names, organisational, politics and opposition. I then investigated the direct action category in more detail.

The terms I looked at (disturbance*, outrage*, violence, crime*, disorder and incident?) were evaluative on a lexico-grammatical level. However, upon reading the texts, I realised that there were other types of evaluation at work in the texts. These were longer and more analytical, operating at the discourse level and could only be discovered by reading the texts. So I read texts. One of the themes that emerged was the tension between organised actions and individual actions. I started planning out Chapter 5, worked out which period to focus on, worked out which articles in that period I was going to analyse, and read a lot of discourse analysis.

I then started to analyse the articles, only to discover something a bit interesting in the arrangement of texts within the articles. It wasn’t mentioned in the scholarship about historical newspapers I’d read. I’m still searching to see if someone, anyone has researched it. I thought it was interesting though, and talked to my supervisor about it. She encouraged me to explore that idea a bit more; maybe it would be interesting in its own right, maybe it would make another chapter stronger.

It’s now becoming something that I think makes the link between Chapters 4 and 5 stronger, but which I think ought to be a chapter itself. This is very much data-driven research; I thought I’d be doing some fairly straightforward (critical) discourse analysis and I wasn’t expecting to find something like this, but instead I’ve found something that makes me reconsider the structure of my thesis.

In a way, I like the chaos. I like having a sense of freedom to explore things, I like being able to say “wow, this is interesting, I should pursue it”, I like getting excited about new things and part of me is going what, wait, how has no one else discovered this? Am I really the first?. I’m a perfectionist, and I have a hard time committing to something because I’m convinced that if I fussed over it just a little more it would be even better. But at the same time, I’m incredibly conscious of the time restraints and the fact that I need to knuckle down and get this thesis done.

Does anyone else feel like this about their thesis? How do you decide between sticking solidly to your plan or haring off after something interesting? Am I setting up a false dichotomy here and it’s possible to have a compromise?

oh no, not another research blog

Apparently this is how the cool kids are disseminating their research.  I’m Kat and I’m an apprentice academic (of sorts).  My background is in corpus linguistics but my thesis also involves discourse analysis, history and politics.  My thesis focuses on how the British women’s suffrage movement was represented in The Times newspaper between 1908 and 1914.  More broadly, my research interests include language and gender, language and power, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.

I also like tea, feminism, activism, books, webcomics, music, LGBT and queer issues, rats, and procrastination.