Tuesday 16 June 2009

Questionnaire

Mandatory questions
1 Nick and blog title
2 Age
3 Gender
4 Education
5 Occupation
6 Place of birth and residence (eg. Zagreb, Croatia/Zagreb, Croatia)

Optional questions
1 Is this your only blog? If not, please name the others.
2 Why did you choose the form of blog? (and not web page or a traditional medium)
3 Why do you write your blog?

How to participate

Those nice bloggers who would like to take part in the research would need to fill out a Questionnaire with 6 short questions that are obligatory and 3 optional question and e-mail it to princess Kristina.
Since blog offers the author complete anonymity, only the author's nick would be used in the research, and princess Kristina has no need to know your real name, unless, of course, you blog under your real name :)
As princess Kristina can't read all the existing blogs, you are more than welcome to suggest your own or some other blog you find interesting. 
Blogs that have more than one author or use only video/photo/audio media, unfortunately, can't participate in this research. Princess Kristina also has to restrict her research to Croatia and U.S., well, at least for now, so blogs whose authors aren't from these two countries, unfortunately, can't participate either. If the author doesn't fill out the Questionnaire princess Kristina can't use their blog for the lack of data, so please fill it out and e-mail it to me.
Once you decide to take part in the research princess Kristina will make a list of your posts she would like to study and e-mail it to you for approval. If for any reason you wish to remove some posts from that list, just say so and princess Kristina will use some other posts that you approve. The information that you give princess Kristina will only be used for the purposes of the research and I promisse not to share it with anyone else (I won't even enclude it in the e-mailed version of the paper that I will send to the participants who express their wish to see it).
If you have any other questions, please send me an e-mail, and I will try to respond as soon as possible.

What's blog got to do with diploma papers anyway???

As you could read in the first post, princess Kristina has to write her diploma paper. She is very happy that she got the chance to be mentored by her favourite Professor, whom she really admires. But what has all that got to do with blogs, you might ask. Well, since princess Kristina studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, CroatiaDepartment of English, and is in love with linguistics, the Professor told her to do an analysis of blogs in Croatian and English language and to compare them based on the cultural context. Since blogs are copyrighted, princess Kristina has to ask for permission to use them, and the only way to contact other bloggers is to get her own blog, hence - bezbojne zelene ideje (in English: colorless green ideas... but this was already taken).
The plan is to leave a comment at interesting blogs and invite their authors to participate in the research. After, hopefully, finding willing bloggers, 5-10 posts would be taken from each blog analysed and compared to Croatian blogs of the same topic, age/gender group etc. keeping in mind the cultural aspect of the whole thing.
If any of the participants would like to see the paper once it's finished, I would be more than glad to e-mail it to them, since it will be written in English. 

Why this blog had to be....

Once upon a time in a kingdom far far away princess Kristina announced she would study English and Italian. The King was shocked, the Queen almost fainted. Why? Because in this kingdom everyone studied engineering or economics, why would princess Kristina study languages and what's more, literature!!! The young Prince was at the time attending high school - mathematics oriented, naturally, and wanted to study computer science, which was the only natural and logical choice. Princess Kristina, on the other hand had, just finished high school, general program, because the King wouldn't let her choose a languages oriented one, and had to "choose" a faculty to study at. The entire population of the kingdom, led by the King and the Queen tried to persuade princess Kristina to give up her silly fantasies and study economics, but she wouldn't even think about it, so they eventually gave up. Princess Kristina really enjoyed the four uni years (it was the old system, now they have a new system 3+2 years, and in accordance with the Bologna declaration - Magna Carta Univeristatum). These four years really flew by, so she decided to hang around for two more years (this was perfectly legitimate since the old system included very big and difficult exams so the students had 2 additional years to take and pass all the exams and write their diploma paper). As you can guess these two years are about to come to their end so princess Kristina has to write her diploma paper, and that's why she had to start this blog.