Ellison_Data_2021.zip
11/03/22 10:42
From: Prof. Arthur Tartt [a.tartt@wyford.ac.uk]
To: Jessica Wentz [jw709@pedworth.ac.uk]
Subject: Ellison data for your postdoc
Hi Jess,
Thanks for agreeing to take a look at this and sorry for sending it over to your student email, they still haven’t managed to get your staff one sorted yet. Will chase.
Here’s the data that you’ll be working with for your postdoc. There’s some pretty esoteric stuff in here, but I expect you’ll be able to make some sense of it. You were a delight to examine and I’m sure you’ll make light work of this.
I’ll be upfront: we want to get something published before the next REF submission period is over. We’d love for another 4* publication in before the end of the submission window and with your help we might just make it. I’d love to have the time to lend a hand but I’m going to be pretty flat out with marking for the next month or so. We’ll see where you are by then.
Of course, given that he died, we’re going to have to add Ellison as a posthumous author, and both myself and his supervisor Prof. Rhodes will need to feature on the paper. Authorship probably yourself, Ellison, Rhodes, me.
I’ll tell you what we already know in case it helps. The zip file I’ve sent over is all of the materials they were able to retrieve from his account before they deleted it. There’s no metadata accompanying them, unfortunately, so the provenance of some of it is a bit murky. Some of them just appear to be screenshots from webpages, some are primary sources, and parts of it appear to be memos and parts of his thesis-in-progress. The boy clearly never heard of a data management plan.
His name was David Ellison. At time of his unfortunate death, he was a PhD candidate here at Wyford University, supervised by Professor Frederick Rhodes. As you may know, Prof. Rhodes is the authority on how communities transform their accumulated knowledge into folk tales. I’m sure you’re familiar with The Abuse of Storytelling and his work on active degradation. Let me know if you need me to lend you a copy of the book.
From what they said at the inquest, Ellison sought Rhodes out because of active degradation. His PhD proposal suggests that he wanted to challenge some of the tenets of active degradation, hypothesising that there were alternative purposes for communities creating shared memories of community events. He planned to explore these alternative purposes with reference to the town of Saltmere as a case study. Saltmere is a town of a medium size on the south coast of England, and (rather unfortunately), is infamous for being one of Rhodes’ original case study locations. As you will recall, Saltmere featured as “Wixham” in Rhodes’ The Abuse of Storytelling, but some dogged journalists from the Mail were able to de-anonymise it as part of their salacious and unprofessional reporting on the book.
He was partway through his third year at the time of his passing, so he’d managed to collect a good amount of data himself already. He interviewed some people that lived in Saltmere (and the surrounding areas), but as they’re already anonymised at source it’s unclear if any of these are members of the original Rhodes study. Other data includes diary extracts that he managed to source from somewhere and other ephemera. There seemed to be a digital element but neither me nor Rhodes could get our heads round it.
He hadn’t been very actively supervised, owing to his protracted periods of fieldwork, Fred’s hip operation and his general tendency to go off-radar. Fred can remember at least three or four supervisions with him, but in all of those he seemed quite confused and his work was sprawling.
Anyway, terrible shame what happened to him. Let’s hope we can make some good come of it yet.
Art
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Prof. Arthur Tartt
Professor of Rural Studies | Wyford University
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Attachment: Ellison_Data_2021.zip
12/03/22 18:04
From: Prof. Arthur Tartt [a.tartt@wyford.ac.uk]
To: Jessica Wentz [jw709@pedworth.ac.uk]
Subject: Chasing Mike and Amy
Hi Jess,
Not sure if you got my email yesterday as haven’t seen a reply from yet but just wanted to say I’ve heard from HR and they can’t issue a contract and your staff email until they get your references back from Mike and Amy. Can you chase them?
Art
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Sent from my iPhone
12/03/22 18:45
From: Jessica Wentz [jw709@pedworth.ac.uk]
To: Prof. Arthur Tartt [a.tartt@wyford.ac.uk]
Subject: Re: Chasing Mike and Amy
Hi Art,
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner! I wanted to take a look through all the files first to see if I had any questions about what you sent over. I haven’t had a chance to do that fully yet. From what I have looked at you’re definitely right - it’s a bit of an eclectic mix! I think I’m going to try sort things before I dig into analysis to see if I can get a bit more structured with it.
As for Mike and Amy - they told me they sent over the references last week so not sure if something’s got lost. I can send them a quick message tomorrow and see if there’s anything on their end.
Thanks,
Jessica Wentz
Doctoral Researcher
Department of Rural Studies
Pedworth University
tease