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The power of rumours is that they can be broadly exchanged, generating a ‘public temper’ (which is everybody’s temper without being anybody’s temper in particular). This article, therefore, describes an approach to measuring the public temper, examining particularly the public temper of an Arab society, namely Saudi Arabia. It addresses the following research question: is it possible to analyse existing (scholarly) rumours to see if they can be used as informants of the public temper of the culture in which they exist? This question is answered ethnographically by analysing 579 Arabic online rumours collected by students as part of their critical engagement with educational technology. Having analysed the data, four categories emerged: the  concerns ,  interests ,  attitudes  and  values  of Saudi Arabia. According to the literature, these four categories, taken together, constitute the  emotional  domain (i.e., the public temper) of a society. Thus, a theoretical proposition (and contribution to the existing literature regarding sociology) is that rumours mirror the public temper of a culture, reflecting a range of emotions from simple to complex (from concerns, interests and attitudes to values). Simpler emotions (e.g., concerns) appear to be more easily affected by rumours than more complex emotions (e.g., values). An implication of this study is that rumours have ‘biographies’, which detail public tempers across space and time. Rumours are ‘records’ of public tempers that should be read in the same way archaeologists read landscapes and remains. Although rumours entail  ill-defined  information, it is feasible to  well define  society through such ill-defined information, meaning that something can come out of its opposite. This study offers ethnographers a new method of understanding public tempers through rumours, alongside conventional meaning-making symbols (e.g., poems).

Understanding the public temper through an evaluation of rumours: an ethnographical method using educational technology