Mathemagenic

During a really nice conversation on my PhD with Janine I thought of a picture explaining how blogging is related to all other things. Not sure if it's self-explanatory, but it was fun to draw :)

Studies are about research I do. Some of them are on weblogs and those usually part of my PhD. Others are part of my work next to the PhD and they could are on all kinds of knowledge management topics (e.g. searching for in-house knowledge or information overload...)

Publications are external resources that I read. Some of them are on weblogs, but others not.

Developing ideas is my main value-added activity :) Usually they are tested in the studies, which are informed by publications I read (and many other things not in this picture :)

Blogging is a way to connect pieces of all (not everything) in one space. In this sense my weblog is an external snapshot of my brain where all those things live articulated and linked.

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This picture started as an attempt to provide a visual view on my PhD methodology. It didn't work that way, but it shows one important thing: there is no clear cut between my PhD and all other things I read and do.

So: one day I'll have to add PhD borders on this picture - to decide which influences are strong enough to be described in my dissertation and which could be ingnored. I have to stay withing the genre boundaries, so can't put my whole life in my dissertation :) Fortunately weblog is much more flexible and much more forgiving (and I'll know one day if it's much more rewarding or not :)

Lois on writing her quals paper:

I keep wanting to add links. Links to definitions, links to more information, links to blogs that have discussed the academic article that I'm presenting, links to other sections of the paper itself that build upon this section. I have been subsumed by hypertext linking.

Somewhere along the line I have stopped just thinking non-linearly and have begun expecting my world to function on multiple planes. I think this is good...but frustrating since this paper has to be presented on paper and paper is boringly, traditionally linear. *sigh*

Very recognisable:

[...] it pains every time I try to squeeze a web of ideas into a tree structure when writing.

In a context of my PhD blogging is drafting in hypertext before it's ready for a linear representation...