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.
Tags: blog reading, blog research, blogging as research, ethnography, methodologyArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/06.html#a1533; comments are here.
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