[Continued from Weblog as a research notebook (1): reading 'Life online' and del.icio.us as bookmarking history]
Next to the “Life online” I’m reading Virtual ethnography by Christine Hine (also: reviews) and Ethnography: Principles in practice by Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson. The first one is a “difficult to read” introduction to ethnographic research online, but it also says a lot about ethnography offline and connections between those two. The second is much easier to read. I really enjoy it and I guess will order my own copy.
Hammersley and Atkinson distinguish between fieldnotes and fieldwork journals. Fieldnotes are documentaries of observations in the field, while fieldwork journals are about documenting researchers’ emotions and involvement, as well as emergent interpretations and analysis of the data.
The distinctions are similar to reporting vs. reflecting styles of conference blogging. One is about documenting events as they are (although this is anyway subjective :), while another is about adding the next layer – emotions, associations, assumptions of what is behind the case and so on.
For the time being I’d like to leave online/offline connections aside and focus only on thinking about types of research notes one can make while studying blogging practices. I could think of several levels:
Artifacts. The nice side of studying online phenomenon is that interactions are documented digitally anyway – one could study weblogs, weblog posts, links between those, data of various tracking tools, etc.
Although artifacts alone may not be enough for understanding blogging. One may need to observe “interaction in action” rather than archives or participate actively to gain understanding of the phenomenon through personal experience. I discussed it in Archaeology and ethnography in weblog research (1) and (2), but found similar discussion and references in Virtual ethnography as well (pp. 22-25).
Next to that there is reflective meta-level: notes on emerging interpretations and ad-hoc analysis. And, at the later stage, some kind of coding and analysis.
Now to documenting those things:
- artifacts – transcripts of “who blogged what when”
- do not need to be documented – created by bloggers “out there” on the web
- have to be found
- may dissappear, so researcher may choose to have a copy locally (publicly, e.g. as a quote in own weblog, or privately, in whatever software)
- process knowledge – “interaction in action”, hidden or dissapearing aspects of weblog interaction (e.g. back channel communication or deleted posts)
- partially documented by bloggers – in posts that include references to backchanneling or in summaries (examples are in this paper)
- may be traced by weblog tracking tools
- not necessarily documented fully and may need researcher’s work to observe and write down
- personal experience of observation/participation
- definitely need researcher’s presence and documenting work
- emerging interpretations and ad-hoc analysis
- researcher’s work anyway :)
- coding and analysis
- something researcher does once data collection is over
Choices for documenting:
- what? – pointers (links to relevant material) or full-text
- how? – paper or digital
- where? – one space (all types of notes together) or multiple spaces
- for whom? – public (accessible for others) or private
[One more post follows]
Tags: blog research, blogging as research, ethnography, methodologyArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/07.html#a1536; comments are here.
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