Facebook and Butler Lies

My main task this week was looking at Facebook! Basically, I looked at the profiles of 3 different bilingual, non-USA-citizen subjects and gathered as many status updates as I could, up to ~50 per person. This is for Sally's project, where she's looking at whether people use the "language barrier" as a means to cater status updates to different audiences (e.g., "friends back home" vs. "new friends you're trying to make in the US").

Lots of meetings and reading - read a draft of Sally's paper, the coding guidelines for Facebook status messages/unitization, and the "butler lies" papers and coding guidelines for Lindsay's project. My main "to do list" for this week will be working with Lindsay and helping Sally organize everything into her master Excel spreadsheet.

In the long term, one goal is to help brainstorm ideas for collecting more data for Lindsay. It's fairly straightforward to get people to give you texts they've sent to others, but it's almost impossible to get them to let you ask the recipients questions about the same texts. It probably feels like an invasion of privacy, or perhaps comes across as "creepy", to ask for contact information for text recipients. One idea presented was to have people sign up for the study in pairs. However, doing so could definitely affect the percentage or nature of butler lies in the data.

Another long-term goal which I haven't even begun looking at is helping Prof. Hancock with website stuff.