Mathemagenic

A quick detour from PhD work into Reboot stuff (I'll blog more on it, only now things are much slower).

Ivan Pope in comments on my experiences of going to a conference with a baby:

Here's my joke: Q: What's the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0? A: In Web 1.0 no-one had any children.

I went through the nineties in the internet industry. No-one had any children. Mine were born in 1997 and 2000, so they just about bracket the crazy years. Now I'm doing the internet again, but this time everyone has kids. It does place a lot of constraints on what is possible (no jumping onto an aeroplane for a meeting at short notice), but it adds a hell of a lot too. As you say, it's a grate icebreaker and subject for smalltalk. And it has mellowed us as well, we're not so crazy for stuff, not so crazy to party and get on with work.

Raises a lot of questions. Why kids are becoming more visible at work now? Is it web2.0 or something else? More on that later.

Technorati: reboot9

One of the practical problem when writing scientific texts about weblogs is dealing with citations. Apart from ethical issues (e.g. blog research ethics, respondent identification) there is a practical problem of combining references to "traditional" publication sources with references to weblog entries. 

In my case weblog entries are also referred to in two ways - (1) as a reference to attribute an idea or support an argument and (2) as a data source used for an illustration - and it could make sense to distinguish between those two. There are also references to my own weblog, which serves an additional role of research diary.

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do for my dissertation, but I'm collecting some inspirational ideas.

Vivian Serfaty in The Mirror and the Veil provides references to weblog posts quoted in the footnotes. Bibliography section is split in a several categories: works cited, diaries cited, archives and webrings, political blogs cites, miscellaneouss.

In Uses of blogs references, weblog links and notes are included in endnotes for each chapter. There is also a bibliography at the end that includes "key sources" (mainly published articles and books, but also a few online essays; weblog entries are not included).

The reflexive thesis by Malcolm Ashmore provides another example. It's not about weblogs, but a good example of referencing all kinds of sources for his dissertation (published as a book in this case). Below is truncated version of TOC:

• Foreword, abstract, etc.
• Introduction
• Chapters 1-7
• Appendix. Nonbibliographical sources and other secrets
• Interviews
• Correspondence
• Referees' reports
• Research proposals
• Early drafts
• Conferences: discourse and relexivity workshops
• Telephone conversations
• Sources of some of "my" textual techniques
• Other secrets
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Any other suggestions?