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'Texting Dr. Tagg': Woman Earns Ph.D. in SMS

by Terrence O'Brien on August 12, 2009 at 03:10 PM

Proving that you really can study anything you want in college, Dr. Caroline Tagg has received a Ph.D. for studying text messaging. The 33-year-old academic spent the last three-and-a-half years studying the use of language in texts at England's Birmingham University English department. For the purposes of her research, Tagg had 235 volunteers send her every text message they sent or received, totaling 11,000 messages.

Her research showed that people treat text messages in much the same way as they do regular, spoken conversation. According to Tagg, abbreviations show up less than one might expect, while texts, like speech, are often riddled with unnecessary words like "um" and "oh." In speaking with the Telegraph, Tagg called the language used in SMS "playful," going on to characterize it as "quite creative" and "expressive." As an example, she pointed to one message in particular: "I will be there not on the dot," in reference to being late for something.

Tagg is currently taking education courses at Birmingham University and will begin a teaching job at the Open University in the Fall. Let's just hope her teaching matter is a little more class-appropriate than some past examples. [From: Telegraph and University of Birmingham]
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Tags: education, phd, sms, text messaging, texting, TextMessaging, top

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