[I'm not an expert in hypertext as a field of study and these are my "thinking aloud" notes when trying to understand it].

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I think it makes sense to distinguish between

• hypertext as a presentation format – e.g. what we encounter on the web
• hypertext works – e.g. hypertext fiction, written to use the format to impact readers in specific – not always predictable – ways by (probably intentionally) connecting presentation-plot-story into a whole
• conceptual hypertext – the conceptual principles of how it works/could work and why that is interesting and valuable

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There was some discussion on difficulties of reading hypertext and the rightful comment by Mark that it shouldn’t be something special since people somehow manage to deal with reading the web. I don’t think that the hypertext as a presentation format is a problem, but from what I’ve seen/read so far it seems that reading hypertext works might be. The challenge is very much about cognitive model (re: Reading Hypertext, chapter 5 by Lowe, I’m only half way through it!) that requires more conscious reading (probably coming from the need to keep all three panels Lowe describes active at the same time to be able to get the story).

I can imagine that in some cases there is also conceptual overhead and usability overhead: the need to understand the principles behind hypertext (=some of what I call conceptual hypertext) and the learning needed to adjust reading behaviour to the particular hypertext system. I’d suggest that it’s those things that could make reading hypertext works difficult for those who don’t have a problem of dealing with hypertext presentations.

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We had a few interesting conversations about weblogs and hypertext. I don’t have any problems agreeing that a weblog is hypertext when we talk about hypertext-as-presentation-format, but woludn’t equate blogging to writing hypertext works. There is more to think and to write about in this respect, but what I think matters most is the (lack of) intentionality in blogging, focus on an individual rather than a story and the time, telling bits and pieces about various stories as they unfold, so there is no way of knowing that the something that appears in the text today will actually fire later the way Chekhov’s gun does.

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Wondering if those who build hypertext tools are busy more with conceptually perfect tools rather than those that serve a purpose/easy to use/fit with the rest of things people do online.

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Since I was asked a couple of times about it I’ll probably come up with what tools I might need as a blogger, but I can already say that I don’t need tools. I need plug-ins and mashups that use conceptual hypertext ideas to turn what I already have on my weblogs into something that works better for me and/or those who come across it.

• Weblogs in business: why not
• Non-linear writing
• Stretching academic conventions, me-as-an-author and rare rushes

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. Forthcoming in: HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)

See on Slideshare: Weblog as a personal thinking space

• 6 years of blogging
• #ht09: some thoughts on hypertext
• Personal side of social media: learning from weblogs

In case you need a proper citation – this is a slight variation of the table that appears in my dissertation (p.87) and HT09 paper (p.296).

• Too serious?
• PhD as jigsaw puzzle
• The power of visible loose ends

I’m a Dr. now :)

• No related posts.

So, I will be collecting donations for Yozhik project. And there is a personal story to it.

Yozhik is Russian for a little hedgehog. It is also the word for a crew-cut and a nickname I gave my sister when her hair was short after chemotherapy. Diana was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1982 when the chances of survival were pretty low. She got through it, but the experience changed everyone in the family.

We learnt how important it is to believe in success and to fight for it, how to live in the present and how to have fun even in the darkest times. And my sister learnt how to be creative  even when being tied to a hospital bed. One of the many crafts she got into  was making funny animals from medicine dropper tubes. Like this Yozhik that lives in our bathroom and encourages Alexander to brush his teeth.

Now, many years after the experience, Diana works in an oncology hospital in Moscow teaching kids how to be creative and crafty. She wants to make a book for them about making funny animals from the dropper tubes and I want to help her with getting it published.

We still have to sort out most of the details: what should be the format, how much money we will need and what is a good way to collect donations. I will be back with specific action points soon, but wanted to write about it now so you know what is the next book I will work on and that I might need your help.

• No related posts.

Most of what I was talking about is in the weblog:

• Slides 2-3: An overview of the PhD approach
• Slides 4-8: What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Slides 9-12: Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments with PhD cover art story as an metaphor for slide 9 (the photo on it is A Topography of Woman by Arlee Barr).

Slides 4-12 are prescriptive. If you want something a bit more academic you can find an overview of the dissertation findings at PhD conclusions: blogging practices of knowledge workers.

• Presentation on weblogs and business: links
• When I’m done
• Rethinking PhD ideas: embedding KM into daily routines

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From an organisational perspective, weblogs provide a people-driven way to share knowledge and to develop ideas. For example, weblogs are useful for:

• Tapping into the undocumented. Blogging provides a low-threshold opportunity to write down ideas not related to current deadlines, but important to prepare for the future. Bloggers might use their weblogs to document their experiences and lessons learnt – those that escape official reports, but are usually very useful for others to learn from.
• Making expertise visible. Weblogs provide traces of personal expertise and practices. Making it visible helps to get an idea of who knows what, which is a starting point for collaboration. Reading a weblog written by experts allows others to gain insight about their ways of thinking and working, and to learn from them.
• Unexpected connections. Weblogs support serendipity – finding ideas that fuel innovation and interesting people to talk to or to combine efforts for a shared goal.

What is essential for facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments?

Putting an individual in control

Blogging works best when it is driven by personal interests and passions. Start by helping potential bloggers to find uses of a weblog personally meaningful for them in the long term – these are essential to sustain blogging while social effects of it emerge. Impose as few rules as possible: freedom and a sense of personal ownership of a weblog are important to be able to find those personally meaningful uses. Personal investment in blogging might create tensions with organisational norms and practices; however, this is the price that must be paid: be prepared to relax rules and embrace ambiguity. Avoid the temptation to measure the business effects of blogging: most of the added value of it is in enabling work rather than doing it, which is difficult to measure explicitly.

Supporting an ecosystem

Blogging is about microcontent – publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level – ecosystems between blog posts and connections between their authors are more interesting and more important. When thinking about introducing weblogs in particular settings, it is essential to create conditions for weblog ecosystems, rather than only supporting individual weblogs. The essential ingredients for this are:

• Readership. Introduce newsfeeds and newsreaders as part of the practices of working with information. Make sure that intranet weblogs are accessible via those.
• Scale. Facilitate the broadest possible reach. Communicate clearly that blogging is supported in your organisation. If there are things that should not be blogged in public, make those exceptions known.
• Visibility. The infrastructure that supports visibility of public weblogs (weblog indexes, aggregators, search engines) has to be recreated if weblogs are used within an organisation.
• Feedback. Bloggers need tools to monitor the interest and reactions of others to their writing, which are often missing when weblog infrastructure is provided by an organisation. Statistics about references and traffic should be made available to the weblog authors.

Making the best out of it

Although blogging looks simple, in practice it requires navigating a number of challenges. To help potential bloggers with those it is necessary to address several points:

• Some uses of weblogs are not obvious. Make sure that unexpected practices of blogging that are useful in relation to work are shared between bloggers.
• Think of blogging as a new tool for old tasks. For example, why not start a weblog for trip reports that are currently lost in separate documents? Lab notebooks, course notes, progress reports, customer communication and many other activities could be shared more easily via weblogs.
• Learn about the risks and benefits of blogging. Discuss those with the people in your organisation and then trust them in knowing what not to talk about in public.
• Provide blogging tools if you can, give basic how-to training or, better, ask a few experienced bloggers to coach newcomers by giving them time and recognition.
• Make it part of “work as usual” – make sure that spending some time on blogging is perceived as normal, account for it in performance appraisals, integrate it with other technologies in your organisation.

If people in your organisation are already blogging, is there still something to do? Definitely: help others to navigate the sea of blog entries, support cross-fertilisation, find ways to reuse quality entries and recognise good authors. This could include, for example, making sure that employee weblogs (and also external ones) are indexed by an intranet search engine or creating a “best of blogs” column in your monthly newsletter. Blogging is best driven by personal passions, but once there, weblogs need to be embedded into organisational practices to bring business value.

• Links
• Personal effectiveness in a knowledge intensive environment
• Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text

I put it online for two purposes:

• as an illustration of how weblog is used at the different stages of developing PhD ideas discussed in the Chapter 3 of my dissertation (where this piece appears) and in the Hypertext paper
• as an annotated view into the ethical issues I struggled with in my dissertation

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Spring 2004. It’s still early in my PhD research and I have not give much thought to ethical questions of doing it. What I did so far was relatively unproblematic: invite people to participate and anonymise the responses; no need to deal with formal requirements for an informed consent.

I work on a paper that uses conversation from my own weblog community as an example. While doing it I realise that my previous research experiences do not provide any guidelines about using and quoting publicly available weblog data in a publication.

27 April 2004 Weblog research ethics

• In this post I do not mention the paper, but I reflect on the dilemmas I face working on it, asking “what would you do when using quotes or stories from public weblogs as examples in your research?” that further breaks into three questions:
  • Do you inform people that you study them?
  • Do you quote anonymously or with attribution?
  • Do you ask for permission?
• I ask for a feedback and also inform the readers “once you are reading this post you are somehow on my radar – beware, I may be studying your weblog :)”

A few people leave comments to the post or provide input in their weblogs while linking back.

29 April 2004 Weblog research ethics (2)

• I summarise the responses:
  • Different opinions about informing the participants and asking for permission; main criteria used is whether weblogs could be considered a publication and treated as such.
  • In respect to quoting: distinction between weblog as a data source and as an information source (similar to any other publication) and protecting privacy and recognising the authorship as a researcher responsibilities.
• I also hint about my feelings in respect to a suggestion of not citing weblogs as a supporting source by articulating that most of my own learning comes from weblogs and not academic publications.

The discussion continues in several weblogs.

16 May 2004 Weblog research ethics (3)

• This post includes links to some of the follow-up discussion, examples of choices by others, and a reference to the ethics guidelines of Association of Internet Research.

Summer-Autumn 2004. I make choices for the paper and move on. After seeing references to the Association of Internet Research (AOIR) in different contexts I arrange for coming to its annual conference.

18 September 2004 AOIR 5.0. Workshop on qualitative research

• This post includes notes from the workshop on multiple topics. I also realise that “although I do internet research, this is not (yet?) my scientific community – unfamiliar names, methods, frames of reference… It feels like discovering the whole new world.”
• My notes in respect to the ethical issues show discovering the complexity of the subject, for example, realising that “private spaces in public” should not be treated as a publication even if the format suggests so.

Spring 2005. I read a lot on ethnography and write many posts attempting to make sense of the role blogging  plays in my research.

4 May 2005 Being researched (2)

• This is a follow-up on another post where I report on discovering weblogs of students who were studying me as part of their assignment. I reflect on the irony of being researcher who is researched and my uneasy feelings of discovering something that was supposed to be private. I relate my experience to the issues of “private spaces in public”.

Summer 2005. I continue my exploration of the methodological challenges that arise at an intersection between blogging and research, giving a talk about the topic at a research institute and writing a proposal for the next AOIR conference. The study of weblogs in Microsoft in July-September provides an another opportunity to make ethical choices. In October I present my work at the AOIR conference and participate in a workshop on ethics of online research, where I pick up additional themes and a few references.

12 October 2005 Good research…

• I write about being “in the middle of post-AOIR thinking on research methodologies, ethics and researcher’s responsibilities”, but only share a quote from the paper on ethics by Annette Markham (2006).

19 October 2005 On the role of theory, researcher accountability and translation

• This is a follow-up on an earlier post on the role of the theory in research: I pick up a reader comment to articulate my beliefs about the researcher accountability, adding in a footnote “Heavily influenced by conversations at AOIR”.

Spring-summer 2006. After disengaging from PhD work for a while due to other obligations, I work on multiple versions of the paper that presents the Microsoft study results (Efimova & Grudin, 2007, also reported in the chapter 6). There I make an implicit choice of not creating an anonymised persona for each of the respondents that have to be justified; as an input I read a collection of essays on the politics of ethnography (Brettell, 1993) mentioned at a AOIR ethics workshop.

11 July 2006 When they read what we write: respondent identification

• I bring together my experiences as a participant in someone else’s research and as a researcher (Microsoft study) to suggest that “sometimes you don’t need a name to recognise that the story told in the research report is associated with a specific person“. I argue that person-centric narratives of weblogs make this situation very likely and relate it to my choice of not creating anonymised personas.
• I recommend Brettel (1993) for an in-depth reading on the topic and promise to “blog it one day“.

Summer 2007. After my maternity leave I get into the final stage of the research, where the work done so far should be integrated into the dissertation.

7 July 2007 Bibliography conventions when writing on weblogs

• I use the examples from other publications to discuss practical question of citing weblogs in my dissertation: distinguishing between different types of citations (weblog as a data source vs. as a reference) via citation placement and formatting.

Summer-autumn 2007. I work on the methodology chapter. Although I post sections of the draft to my weblog, the section on ethics doesn’t appear there. Partly because it heavily uses the insights already covered in the weblog, but also because I’m not happy with the way those are integrated.

Summer 2008. While working on this example I get a better idea what has do be changed in the ethics section and write on Twitter: “wanted to use a section from the Methodology chapter to illustrate something else. Now rewriting it” .

At the same time I work on a paper, on my choices for integrating blogging in the dissertation text, that has a section on ethical choices of representing bloggers (Efimova, 2008). While working on the paper I reread some of the essays on the politics of ethnography.

3 September 2008 Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report

• I blog on the parallels between the ethical challenges of presenting the results of a study of academics in one of the essays (Sheehan, 1993) and those that I face in my own work. The quotes I include, and the discussion of them, are important for my thinking on the issue, but they are tangential to the paper.

September 2008. As soon as I finish the paper I go back to the Methodology chapter and reuse the paper text to rewrite the section on ethics, now close to its final version.

• Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report
• Bloggers cited in my dissertation
• Weblog research ethics (2)

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. Forthcoming in: HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)

Abstract. While weblogs have been conceptualised as personal thinking spaces since their early days, those uses have not been studied in detail. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a weblog can contribute to the process of developing ideas in a long-term complex project. To do so I use autoethnography to reconstruct my personal blogging practices in relation to developing PhD ideas from two perspectives. I first discuss my practices of using a weblog as a personal information management tool and then analyse its uses at different stages in the process of working on a PhD dissertation: dealing with fuzzy insights, sense-making and turning ideas into a dissertation text. The findings illustrate that next to supporting thinking in a way private notebooks do, a weblog might serve similar roles as papers on one’s office desk: dealing with emerging insights and difficult to categorise ideas, while at the same time creating opportunities for accidental feedback and impressing those who drop by.

© ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557963 [This is the first time I actually tried to negotiate something different from the default copyright agreement; it didn't work.]

• Reference to a wiki page???
• Finding confidence while bridging multiple research practices
• Knowledge workers redefined: responsibility and creating value by acting on knowledge

This is what I wrote a few months ago as a welcoming message of my weblog. Now, even more than when, I feel that my house represents the state of other things in my life.

While being busy with the PhD work didn’t take all my time, it occupied my mind and also sucked a lot of energy. While urgent things in the house and general cleanliness were taken care of (it’s not falling apart and in the state of “ok to have friends for dinner” ;), I feel surrounded by all kinds of unsorted things in wrong places and unfinished tasks that accumulated over time. I try tackling them one by one in the pockets of time between other things, but feel that that those are changes on the surface, that more is needed to turn the house into a place I want it to be.

I also feel burnt out physically, mentally and emotionally. When finishing the dissertation I thought that the worst was over. I did compare working on the dissertation to pregnancy, but didn’t realise that after the “birth” the parallels can go further:

Quote from: untenured on August 18, 2006, 10:42:02 AM

Perhaps there is an analogy to post-partum depression.  Instead of child, you birthed a thesis.   I bet your gestation period was a lot longer than nine months.

That is a good analogy, Untenured.  In fact, I experienced more weirdness and depression after finishing the diss than I did after the birth of either of my two kids.  I’m thinking maybe it’s because a 400+ page thesis is not at all cute and cuddly, plus you can’t breastfeed it.  :)

Some call it Post Dissertation Stress Disorder. Don’t think that I have the worst form of it, since I don’t have all the the symptoms (only those: Foggy brain, Inability to concentrate on anything longer than 10 minutes and Pure laziness :) Fun aside, wish I knew earlier that something like that should be expected after finishing the dissertation.

Ideally I would take a few weeks off right now, but I’m not done yet. So, I’m taking it (=everything) easy, starting to sort out things in the house and hoping that the rest will follow.

• 1/2 page description of my PhD research
• Finding confidence while bridging multiple research practices
• OKLC04: PhD workshop notes