Yesterday, local blogger DaniGirl of Postcards from the Mothership reported that she was freaked out and felt violated that her blog along with 7 others had become the subject of a master's thesis, “Works in Progress: An Analysis of Canadian Mommyblogs by Heather Lyn Fleming.
According to DaniGirl, Fleming made "egregious assumptions" about the bloggers and was unethical in not contacting them or getting their permission before writing or publishing.
I'm don't know what the "egregious assumptions" were. They might be mentioned somewhere in DaniGirl's original posting on the thesis, but I don't want to take the time to go through the 97 comments on the off chance they are mentioned. I think I'll just assume that I wouldn't find them to be any worse than assumptions I've made when reading other people's blogs.
In Today's followup, DaniGirl seems to be less freaked out and has backed away from her original position, but not all the way:
I can’t say that I regret my original post, because I wrote it in good faith and I think it resulted in a truly fascinating conversation. I haven’t changed my mind about thinking that Theryn crossed a line in her assumptions, and that she took my work out of context.Of course, Fleming is also a blogger. She seems to have taken the criticism in stride:
February 22, 2010
#creepythesis
I woke up yesterday morning to find my thesis had its own twitter hashtag.
I’m not going to launch into a defense. Readers are free to think my writing is crap, skim it, interpret it differently than I intended, etc. That’s the nature of writing. I just wanted to acknowledge that I’ve seen the reaction.
On the bright side (!), more people probably read my thesis yesterday than read most people’s theses ever
For more commentary:
- Dani is feeling indignant at Coffee with Julia
- #creepythesis on Twitter
- "Me, " the Subject of a Master's Thesis...?
- Creepy Thesis? by a subject who didn't find it all that creepy
