So finally I have some results. "Excellent progress" says my supervisor. "Finally!" says I.

I have indeed begun to analyse my corpus. I'm starting on some fairly straightforward linguistic stuff, which basically requires me to run my text through some software, and play with the statistics.

Oh...I should mention something on my files. Traditionally results of analyses such as I am conducting of average over an authors texts, so we had decided to split each subjects blog into the individual posts. I had forgotten this, and was already to go when it came back to me. This process of splitting the files delayed me slightly...not least because it has left me with almost 2000 individual files to work with. Which is a lot.

So anyway, my first stages of analysis are replication studies. A colleague did his studies on a corpus of e-mails, and I am looking to see if I get similar results. His first work was actually replication of the work of a well known academic in the field, so I'm currently doing replication². Apparently, either together or separately, this work may be publishable. Yay!!

So far I've just got a whole load of number, I still need to look at them closely to see what they actually mean. I also have to write them up...well I don't have to but I should. Which is a big problem for me: I like doing, not writing. I just want to get on and run more and more analyses and get more and more number. I don't want to take time out from getting somewhere to make lots of table and write lots of text explaining the statistics. I am aware, however, that eventually I will have to for my thesis, and it's good to get it out of the way at the time when I know what I'm talking about, and it's a tangible way to show others my work. So I will do it.

That's today's main task: spend time explaining the numbers I already have before I run off getting more. Hopefully this will help me get to grips with what it all means, and I can start reporting some results here.