Table 1
Identified themes and the number of commentor-to-commentor conversations around each theme within the corpus.
| THEME | CONVERSATIONS WITH THAT THEME |
|---|---|
| PicsForSale | 17 |
| ItemIsAGift | 13 |
| BasicQuery | 12 |
| PricesGiven | 9 |
| PMforDetails | 9 |
| SourceOfBones | 8 |
| CrossPost/Repost | 8 |
| PostageCoversPriceofGift | 6 |
| IsThisLegal | 5 |
| Ethics(Ours) | 4 |
| StorySellsThePhoto | 3 |
Table 2
Select identified themes or concepts, their definition, and example text.
| THEME | GENERAL DEFINITION OF SELECT THEMES | EXAMPLE PARAPHRASED TEXT |
|---|---|---|
| The BOGO gambit | Wording to suggest that the remains are being gifted instead of sold. | “For sale is the photo, item is a gift that comes with it.” |
| SourceOfBones | Inquiring as to the source of the remains. | “Where can one source a human skull from in Australia…without sounding like a psycho…?” |
| IsThisLegal | Discussion of the legality of what buyers or sellers are doing or proposing to do. | “What are the rules applying to human body parts? Is a licence needed?” |
| Ethics(Ours) | Discussion of the ethical stance of those who buy, sell, or ‘gift’ remains. | “I revel in telling people who try to judge or shame me for my collecting. Make them as uncomfortable as possible… Keep collecting. Don’t ever hide what makes you happy.” |
| QualitySeller | Discourses signalling or querying the quality of the ‘goods’ that the seller provides, where ‘quality’ can be understood as both the material and story/source | “Couldn’t recommend the seller enough, fast, well priced and professional.” |
| Persecution Complex | Displeasure at how the human remains collecting community is viewed. | “What have I learnt today. Don’t tell anyone I talk to apart from on these groups of course that I was gifted hooman bones and dog skulls. Oh boy did I get a lecture today about how illegal and immoral it is with the human bones…” |
Figure 1
A network visualization created using Voyant Tools showing posts by key players (the central node in each pinwheel) and responses to each post (the arms). Copyright c/o the author.
Figure 2
A t-SNE plot of the top 50 words in the corpus expressed as relative frequencies and coloured into three main clusters (pink, blue and green circles), created using Voyant Tools. Copyright c/o the author.