Mathemagenic

Since my discovery of autoethnography I became more serious about my own weblog as a data input. Today I read/skimmed through 329 pages of my weblog in 2004 looking for ideas about blogging as part of research method. This is a quick reflection...

What I found:

• seeds of ideas and relations that grew over time into something totally unexpected (tracing things developing over time is fun - like looking through family photo albums)
• countless "I'll do it later" things that I never did
• several cases of "I woke up with this idea in mind and I have to blog it"
• ideas I forgot I had
• errors
• being surprised that I can write so good (and so bad ;)
• memories of emotions and stories behind posts (so strange - sometime one sentence moves you back into the past as it was today)

Or a bit more serious - possible coding categories for looking at weblog posts from "blogging research" perspective:

• publishing/dissemination/announcements (of papers, presentations, events by me and others)
• research process
  • reflections
  • emotions
• event blogging
  • notes
  • reflections
  • event planning (including travel planning)
• paper blogging (notes on papers I read)
• asking for help (explicit)
• "enculturation" into research (reflection/learning on research culture, practices, tricks of the trade, etc.)
• articulation
  • articulation of personal experiences (relevant for PhD)
  • articulation of problems/questions (may be implicit call for help, but often just thinking aloud)
• writing-related (this is the difficult one)
  • drafting/testing pieces that supposed to go into a paper
  • giving space to pieces that do not fit into a paper
• reflections on methodology

Not sure if I'll do something with it... I guess some kinds of classifications of research notes (e.g. in ethnography) should exist - would be interesting to compare.

And - I should be back to blogging - was away and had some tech problems.