Mathemagenic

[When I talked about it with Bev in Copenhagen I realised it might be worth writing down]

I started my PhD research with an idealistic target to create something that people would read and find useful. As I worked on it the “people” turned into bloggers, my peers on the quest of figuring out where weblogs fit in knowledge-intensive environments. They were the audience that I wanted to reach with my work.

I didn’t realise that doing PhD research is extremely slow comparing to the fun of playing with new ideas in my professional community. As I moved beyond the early studies into doing research and writing about it, I felt more and more being behind. There were a few “objective” reasons to stop reading other blogs, but also  an emotional one next to them: reading about new ideas people in my network were playing with made me feel working on “yesterday’s news”. It also made clear that my work wasn’t that interesting for my imagined audience, so I was losing my main motivation to do it.

I struggled with it for a while. As I eventually figured out the problem was in my own expectations and I had the answers in the first paper I wrote on weblogs that I mechanically copy-pasted into the introduction chapter of my dissertation. I wanted to study blogging to get an understanding of where it fits for the “pragmatists” who come after “enthusiastic early adopters”, yet it’s early adopters I imagined as my audience.

That changed everything. As I realised that I’m not writing for my “early adopter” peers, but for people who were only getting into blogging, it suddently made more sense.

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While talking with a colleague about minimalistic presentations (~ Presentation zen style) I noticed something I didn’t pay attention before: how dropping everything, including corporate templates, focuses attention on the presenter, not the organisation he represents.

And then I keep wondering if those corporate templates actually do anything - when I hear a good talk I remember the speaker, not the company. May be it’s one more illusion of corporate communication departments…

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My recent silence (and being stuck with the last study for my dissertation as the main reason for it) is a results of an attempt to make my research more transparent and inclusive by doing it “in public”.

My original intentions are outlined in the study description I used to invite bloggers to participate,  Networking practices of KM bloggers:

In general I prefer using real names of the participants and links to their weblogs to give credits similar to how it’s done in the blogging world. [...]

I would like to post summary of the interview on my weblog (after all interviews are done). I will email it to you before posting, so you can correct anything wrong or decide if it should not be published.

There is a chance that I will blog about work-in-progress while analysing the interview data or working on a publication. In this case I will only quote from publicly available sources (e.g. from your weblog or summary of the interview after you give permission to publish it online).

The main motivation behind this approach was to give credits to the participants and create a possibility of a dialogue around their contributions. I also didn’t expect that the things I wanted to ask would be extremely sensitive, so thought that bloggers wouldn’t mind (or even would appreciate) sharing them in public (in fact, a couple of people I interviewed said that I could just post interview summaries without checking with them first). An additional motivation for doing so was “methodological”: adding transparency to the research process as a way to improve the research quality.

Now what’s happened:

I’ve got stuck with writing interview summaries as those had to satisfy both, putting them online and analysing them for my research. For the analysis the ideal way would be to have “extended summaries”, those with as many direct transcripts of actual interviews as possible, however those would be too long and too fragmented to post in public. I could also make shorter summaries to post online, but this would limit what I could use while discussing the results since I promised to “only quote from publicly available sources”.

So I thought of analysing the data, deciding what had to be quoted and revising the summaries accordingly. But then I’ve got stuck with the analysis. For me discussing emergent interpretation with others is the best way to get “unstuck” and for this study doing that in the weblog would be really the best option. However, I couldn’t blog about anything untill posting the interview summaries online. And I couldn’t write those summaries either…

I eventually got “unstuck” with finding a way to discuss the interviews before making public summaries of them. I made anonymous summaries and used them to have a discussion on emergent themes with two colleagues who are far from blogging. With that input I could get a better picture of how to discuss the study results and which parts of the interviews are really important to include. I’m currently making blog-friendly versions of the anonymous summaries, so I can finally email those to the participants to be checked, post them online and get into blogging the results.

In the process I also figured out a few other issues with making the research data publicly available and attributed to the participants: it made more challenging including background data on the participants (e.g. age) or discussing “difficult” issues around their practices. So, my idealistic attempt for an “extreme” transparency didn’t really work - I guess I’ll be more moderate next times :)

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For quite a while I’ve been on a conference abstinence track - not submitting papers and limiting attendance in order not to get distracted from the PhD writing.

That’s said, I’m extremely happy writing a paper and going to Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen. It was intense (especially given that I didn’t finish a PhD chapter before leaving) and insightful - it feels that I had all the conversations put on hold over last year in four days… And, the best thing of that came out of it is - somehow having all those conversations really helped me to feel that “I’m there” PhD-wise. Of course, there is still lots of writing to be done, but that feels more like working out all the loose ends and making threads that go through different pieces more visible and more strong. The conference was also good to start thinking about the post-PhD life - reflecting on what topics and people I was drawn to helps to get a feeling of where I’ll be heading next.

I hope to be able to write on some of the themes in more detail, so just the highlights to remember what to write about (I may also come back and edit this post with more ideas and links):

• a distinction between friendship-based and interest-based participation and learning in a keynote by Mimi Ito (notes by Axel Bruns), loosely corresponding to maintaining existing connections and creating new ones
• thinking about online places - their differences from physical places and co-presence as a way of constructing them - and ways of studying (in) them
  • communities, online places and participation; multiple places + multi-membership
  • experienced as an individual and implications for research and practice
• learning: community-based, (duad) relation-based, artefact-based?
• different ways to look at privacy: episodes, aggregations over time, patterns, lifestreaming triangulations
• blogs
  • blogs as transitional objects (find the paper!)
  • exploring identity and constructing identity in one space; changes over time
  • crafts online and research on mommy-blogging (loved to see research done on things I am exposed to via non-work blog reading)
• researching fast changing fields - audiences and expectations (later:
  Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations)

Twitter notes from two ‘communities’ session on the last day are here.

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It’s my birthday today. It happen to be a day full of emotions - getting up early to write, driving through autumn sun to get relaxing foot massage as my birthday present, nice conversations at work, smiling at birthday greetings popping up on different channels and writing that was easy for a change.

In the evening I found that my uncle died yesterday. They didn’t want to tell me, but as soon as I heard my mom’s voice I knew something was wrong. Being sad, being happy that last time in Russia we spent a good time together, being angry that I couldn’t be there with my family, smiling at the little guy who wants to play, trying not to be afraid thinking of my family being so far away…

But behind all that being grateful for how much I have - including this day, full of emotions… Realising that whatever happens, the best thing I can do is to be here, to be present, to live fully now, to be with those I love, to do things I enjoy doing…

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