I’ve posted a PDF of my AoIR paper at http://jenr.edublogs.org/2008/08/29/paper-for-aoir-conference-traces-of-self/ – I would really welcome any comments.

The discussion of ‘role conflicts’ in your abstract:

“As my blogging served me in both roles, a researcher and a blogger, it was not always easy to separate them and to make choices in the case of a role conflicts. Writing my weblog as a way of participating in blogging cultures I study and writing academic texts with the results of those studies turned into a struggle with writing conventions behind those two. Being a researcher who blogs I held myself accountable for my weblog writing in a similar ways as in writing papers. Being a blogger who does research I kept wondering if there are ways to write research papers in a way that is understandable and engaging for non researchers.”

- the blogger as researcher and researcher as blogger – would seem to link in with the mask genres in lots of ways – but maybe especially as discipline. The disciplined academic and the disciplined blogger may not easily co-exist. I like Mortensen’s 2004 article on academic blogging: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/personal_publication.html – she calls it a ‘twilight zone’! :-)

Really interesting, all of this. Yes, please let’s have a chat in Copenhagen. Good luck with your dissertation, in the meantime!

*The paper I’m working on right now is for the AoIR workshop IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge. I’m playing with an idea to use your six genres in a discussion, but not sure it will fit given the focus (the proposal).

How excellent to find that the masks resonate with you in methodological terms.

I am still really fascinated with them, and particularly with tensions in unraveling how much a mask is chosen and deliberate, and how much we are inscribed and ‘masked’ by our educational and professional contexts. In fact, I have changed the name of one of the six genres from ‘punishment’ to ‘discipline’, now, which I think opens up lots of new ways of thinking through constraint and learning – being in a discipline, being disciplined.

I’ll be talking about this, particularly the ‘trace’ as archive and as inscription, at AoIR in Copenhagen in October – will you be there?

Thanks for your post – I was getting ready to write a few new blog entries anyway, and now I feel quite inspired to do it!