Thesis Research: Epithets and Permission

[opalsong]

Hey guys, as many of you already know I'm in a Masters program in Linguistics.  This means a thesis!  While I'm not planning on writing my thesis (or doing the bulk of the work on it) until next year, I am applying for a (maybe more than one?) scholarship and with that comes the need to know what the crap my thesis is going to be.  My broad topic is Terrible Written English and where else can you find a vast amount of publicly available (no ethics board approval required!) terrible writing than fanfiction (not that all of it is bad, but everyone's gotta start somewhere right?)

This is where you guys come in.  I'd love to do my thesis on Epithets (for example, using "the redhead" to constantly refer to Ron Weasley, or "the boy with glasses" to refer to Harry Potter, or "the seventeen year old" to refer to ~my awesome self-insert character~).  The thing is that this isn't a well known problem outside of fandom.  Within fandom I've talked to numerous people about how much they hate epithets and how they avoid fic with them (something that my advisor was surprised to hear).  I need a public discussion that I can refer to so I can go "This is really a problem! Look!  People in the community can identify it!"  I'd also really love if you could point me to (rec me?) stories that do this so I then have a body of work to draw from.

On a different, but related note: I'm going to be doing my thesis on these bad fics.  According to academia, I don't need to ask permission to use them any more than I would ask permission to use a Jane Austin novel or Twilight.  However, I'm wondering if I should informally ask permission/ask if this makes them uncomfortable anyway?  But who would say yes (among, likely newish, likely young, fragile writers) to their story being used in a study on terrible writing?

Please help!  And Thank You in advance!

Comments

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at fanficrants? They might have a few posts about epithets. I'm almost sure they have posts about such nonword epithets as "the pinkette", at least.

[opalsong.livejournal.com]

Ooooo. Thanks! I'll definitely look there.

[concinnity.livejournal.com]

It is technically legal but not very ethical to use people's fic for research without their consent. The OTW has a long post about why here. (https://transformativeworks.org/projects/twc-citation) This seems fairly straightforward as you say in your post above that you are going to be looking at "newish, likely young, fragile writers" and telling the world how crap their writing is.

Fandom has enough terrible things said about it all the time by people who aren't fannish - what end does doing it from within serve? There's also a pretty big difference between IRB approved/departmentally approved/ scholarly field approved. Ime.

Which might just be another way of saying - tell us more about your research proposal! I suspect your goal isn't just finger-pointing at immature-by-some-standards writing, but is going to do something neat re: linguistics. I studied a fair bit of linguistics during my MA, so I'm curious. :)