Home : Mobile : News

Student nabs first PhD in texting

A post graduate student has received what is believed to be the UK's first SMS-focused doctorate.

By Maggie Holland, 10 Aug 2009 at 11:33

The University of Birmingham has awarded what is believed to be the UK’s first PhD in text messaging.

Postgraduate student Caroline Tagg studied people’s use of SMS for more than three years to gain the academic accolade. The study involved the analysis of more than 11,000 text messages and just short of 200,00 words.

"Actually, not many people use abbreviations. People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive,” she said in an interview with the Telegraph newspaper.

"It was interesting to be able to research a number of linguistic methods and frameworks and apply them to the text message, because the text messages were quite fun. It was enlightening."

Email to a friend

Print this page

< Previous Mobile : News Next >

Be the first to comment on this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.

Latest Mobile Analysis & Insight

Welcome to the stay-at-home Olympics

Inside the Enterprise: The Government has warned of disruption, and the Civil Service is practising working from home. Could IT yet save businesses from chaos on an Olympian scale?

More Mobile Analysis & Insight

Latest Mobile Reviews

BlackBerry Bold 9790 review

Rating:

The Bold 9790 is the latest BlackBerry to run RIM’s new BlackBerry 7 OS, but does this budget offering for business users cut too many corners to compete? Julian Prokaza finds out.