Abstract
This chapter uses the Imitation Game to explore Scottish and English identities in the wake of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The two hypotheses—(a) Scottish people would have a stronger sense of national identity than English people, and (b) it would be harder for English people to pretend to be Scottish than vice versa—were based on the idea that Scots are more reflexively aware of their distinct identity. The quantitative data confirmed both hypotheses whilst the qualitative data gives an insight into the way Englishness functions as a hegemonic identity within the United Kingdom. The chapter concludes by highlighting the opportunities for longitudinal research using the Imitation Game method.
Authors are listed alphabetically. The authors would like to thank Helia Marreiros and Michael Kattirtzi for their invaluable assistance in fieldwork and data collection. The contributions to research described in this chapter are as follows:
• Research design: Collins, Evans, Weinel
• Software: Hall
• Fieldwork and Data Collections: Weinel and Kattirtzi (Edinburgh), Evans and Marreiros (Southampton)
• Data Analysis: Evans, Weinel, O’Mahoney
• Writing up: Evans
The research was funded by a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant (269463 IMGAME) awarded to Collins.
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Notes
- 1.
For clarity, we capitalize the Imitation Game when referring to its use as a social science research method.
- 2.
The Interrogator/Judge is a role played by a single person in the three-player Game but actually contains two distinct tasks—asking questions and evaluating answers—that can be performed by different people. This difference becomes important later, hence the use of the more complex terminology at this stage.
- 3.
We differentiate by color to avoid the implication of chronology or ranking that is created by numerical labels such as “first judging” and “second judging.”
- 4.
This is a simplified version of the list set out in Collins et al. (2017). Some questions will be coded as belonging to more than one category as they might, for example, as if the Players know about something and, if so, what their opinion is—for example, “What is X and do you like it?”
- 5.
Note that, in this context, “work” refers to the extent to which the answers produced enabled Judges to distinguish between Pretenders and Non-Pretenders. This emphasis on identifying differences between groups is a particular feature of the Imitation Game. One corollary of this is that knowledge that is shared between the two groups is not explored directly, though questions that “fail” to discriminate may unwittingly reveal some of the cultural knowledge that is common to both groups.
- 6.
Wordles were created using https://www.wordclouds.com/ (accessed Feb. 25, 2019).
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Collins, H., Evans, R., Hall, M., O’Mahoney, H., Weinel, M. (2019). Bonfire Night and Burns Night: Using the Imitation Game to Research English and Scottish Identities. In: Caudill, D.S., Conley, S.N., Gorman, M.E., Weinel, M. (eds) The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14335-0_7
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