The finished product.

The website can be located here:

RSEL Group 1 Research Website

We are very pleased with the overall turn out of the website however if all else fails all the sound files are posted on our Youtube channel, found here, so the sound files cans till be accessed if there is a problem with the website.

"What we’ve done and what we need to do" or: The perils of the digital revolution

As stated our current aim is the collection and analysis of data. However a relatively large problem was encounter during this process. After a mass buying of news papers from all areas of print, we discovered a fundamental flaw, personal columns or lonely hearts ads are now somewhat scarce. Aside from a few examples in local and free papers (which we felt would not give a particularly good representation of the public), data was rather hard to come by. This is likely due to the popularity of social networking and the internet.

So (and rather appropriately for this module) we've shifted our attention to the internet, and personal ads on dating websites. This throws up some interesting areas that will affect our report.

•  With printed personal ads you tend to pay per word, this is not the case with online ads so structure, abbreviations and other features of printed ads are no longer present.
• We can no longer compare between different varieties of newspaper (tabloid, broadsheet, etc.) so may have to focus on other variables.
•  There are literally dozens of dating sites out there, each with a different take on the medium. We have selected one or two of the bigger sites that provided a “general service” (i.e. don’t cater towards people from specific careers, faiths, etc).

Currently we are collecting data from a variety of ages across both genders, as our main focus with be language and gender comparisons.

Still to do is obviously the analysis and formulation of the presentation. More info on how we will organise the presentation on the website should follow soon, after a bit more discussion.

The backup

With Bill's advice, I quickly set up a very basic site on a different server, just in case the main one goes down for any reason.

http://rselgroup1.moonfruit.com/

Update 27/10/11

We feel that our original question was somewhat too narrow at this stage of the investigation. We want to expand it from focusing solely on adjectives to include verbs and noun phrases, whilst continuing the idea of comparing the use in male and female adds. After collecting and analysing some data over the next few days, if any area seems too hold interesting scope for discussion we may also include that in the project. We will finalise the research question after this information has been gathered.

The Website

The skeleton for the website is up, found here; http://www.wix.com/rselgroup1/project

I decided to take a really minimal approach, plenty of scope for more pages, should be really easy to navigate and easy to add sound clips/youtube videos later on.

Let me know if there's anything you think I should add/change, the colour scheme is completely editable for example.

Link to GLA on google docs

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jh57c2jkIZYpHe3AVM4FgQUvzPFP4T4AzAwI83A0SOw/edit?hl=en_US

Week 4-5

Aims:

Unfortunately due to various issues we were late in posting our GLA, for which we apologise. However we feel we are now on top of where we are meant to be and are making sure that once we receive feedback we will meet up as soon as possible to redraft our GLA and meanwhile continue our background reading and look for extra studies relating to our research question. We are also going to make sure we talk to Alison Sealey on Wednesday to discuss how our project is developing, watch and read the relevant information on the wiki and continue developing our ideas through the blog and start collecting relevant data so that by week 7 we will post our reflections of our data on the blog:

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bOFasP349PA/TmiVjHVaxuI/AAAAAAAADoM/vWKWtMnss00/s1600/RSEL+Timeline.png)

Additionally due to the fact it would be impractical to create a pilot study, whilst collecting data we will refine our question and make sure our focus areas are appropriate.