The Enigma Order

Hi,

my name is Stefan and I am a student of English and philosophy in Saarbrücken, Germany. I am currently preparing my thesis on the topic of “Language in World of Warcraft”. As a basis for the research, I intend to create a Corpus (I’ll explain that later) of WoW-related language. To do that I will need as much text (mostly meaning “chat”) as I can get and I will need to get it from an English server, of course.
Some of the channels that I would like to monitor are publicly accessible (like “general”, “trade”, “looking for group”, random dungeon groups). However, to get the full picture of communication in WoW, I will need to join a rather large guild that is engaged in all aspects of the game (raid, social, a little pvp) and use the chatlog command of WoW to collect data. In addition to that I would like to hang out in whatever voice communication tool you use during raids, record raid communication, transcribe it manually (omg that will be a lot of work) and add it to the corpus.

Letting me do this within your guild would be just incredibly great and generous of you. So I would like to pay you back a little by transferring my 85 holy priest to your server to help with daily guild business as much as I can. This would entail that I would not play in the least to improve my char. Instead, I would donate every bit of useful stuff I can find to the guild bank. My char is herb/alchi, so I could farm herbs occasionally and offer my transmute cd on a daily basis. In addition to that I would heal alts (or mains) through dailys, farm-raids of older content or whatever. Having a healer to speed up the waiting process never hurts. Oh, and btw I am a damn good player too.

Now, I know that this sounds a bit like spying on you or even an invasion of private space or whatever. I would ask you to consider the following points that will show that it really is not a big deal.

-I wouldn’t give you any trouble. I’ll just hang out with my char for a couple of months and help as much as possible.

-What I am doing is something that every one of your guild members could do simply by using chat commands. What I mean is: it’s not like I would record highly private stuff by questionable means or anything. Guild chat and raid talk is fairly open and the means to record it are built-in functions that every guild member could employ.

-Most important: What will I do with the data?
I will use it to create a Corpus. Fortunately Corpora are collections of text that, in a certain way, entail a high degree of anonymisation. A corpus is a collection of texts that is being parsed by a computer program (which actually means that no one will ever read whole sentences of the data). Basically, all this program does is to count words. A typical result for my thesis might be: “The words “LF”, “heal”, “tank” are used to a percentage of X in the channel “LookingForGroup” as opposed to a percentage of Y in the channel “Guild”.” Using this as a basis, I can create an informed description of language in WoW.
Sounds pretty boring, eh? Well... at least it’s got something to do with gaming, unlike most topics for theses.

-To you, the whole matter will look like this: You’ll have a little helper for 2-3 months. To me... well. Finding a suitable guild is absolutely essential.

In case you are feeling generous and think about letting me do this, I would love to talk to you via voice chat to answer all your questions.
I hope we can make this work. It would really mean a lot to me (and to science of course .