In my dissertation I describe uses of weblogs as a sense-making instrument that provides a way to deal with unexpected or complex ideas by supporting articulation and organising ideas at a personal level combined with distributed collaborative thinking in “sense-making networks“. While exploring this theme as part of the content of my research was somewhat expected, I did not realise how much reflecting on practices of others and my blogging experiences in that respect would challenge my research methodology-wise.

Blogging research not only turned into participatory research and involving others as co-researchers. As I experienced the flexibility of organising my thinking with the weblog, as well as the fun and added value of the social nature of it, it became more and more difficult to use conventional data analysis methods and tools.

As it’s easy to attribute to my own personality or strange choices, I was glad to hear that I’m not alone in it. Stuart French on blogs as study tool (once you are there check University 2.0 too):

The real research is happening in NVivo, but I find that I do a lot of my thinking better in a blog than a analytic memo, so I started interchanging the two. If a memo was about a specific data or participant then in went into NVivo and was linked, but the more general thoughts about underlying cause/efect relationships, theories in the literature and in use by the participants to make sense of their environments…they end up in the blog.

More and more though, I find the challenge of writing for public consumption adds something of an edge to the process of analysis so many of the recent posts have been to this blog rather than my private one.

In my own case blogging came before I made a choice for specific data analysis methods or considered using tools for qualitative data analysis. When I tried some of them, I missed two things in comparison to blogging: flexibility of dealing with fuzzy data and emergent assumptions, and an easy way to involve of others in the process . While on the technology side including those capabilities in the research tools is probably just a matter of time, I believe that addressing them methodology-wise provides a bigger challenge.

My experiences of sense-making as a flexible, intuitive and messy process raise questions about finding a methodologically sound way to accommodate for those:

If expertise is difficult to articulate, how would you specify (for example) explicit coding criteria to pinpoint patterns? How far the need to make things explicit, to categorise beforehand would ruin the richness of what could be found? How far the decisions on what are the patterns could be logically explained? How easily the process itself could be articulated for an examination by others?

The social nature of sense-making with blogging indicates other challenges. While action research methodologies do provide a way to include others in research, the ways of doing so rely on having a shared goal and cycles of planning, action and reflection. In the case of blogging research involvement of others is unplanned, casual, and fragmented. It is those characteristics that make involvement of others especially valuable (re: exposure and unexpected connections across boundaries), they difficult to account for methodologically.

• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography
• Virtual methods seminar
• Kate Fox on participant observation and hidden rules of English behaviour

Just a quick reflection on what I (often not thinking about it) do to increase chances of recognising patterns in a mess. Not scientific at all :)

I try to experience the field prior to the whole pattern-recognition exercise (or I get into pattern-recognising for the fields I’m familiar with). Knowledge (often tacit) of how things are/could be creates a bigger picture where new messy data have to fit – contrasting “prior” and “new” helps to see patterns.

I increase the mess by adding variety, more sources, more data. I guess once my brain can’t cope anymore with processing the volume it starts clustering things together – and those often turn into patterns.

I decompose to elements: I identify some basic elements/characteristics of the phenomenon and try to figure out more about them. Somehow having details worked out often brings them into a whole picture.

I search for metaphors in other fields. Especially in the times of being totally lost, I look beyond the field. Usually this means reading unrelated, but interesting books, talking to strange people, taking strange courses… I guess in this case my brain is still working on the original problem in the background, so it finds a way to translate it into whatever other strange field. Once I see the parallels I try to work them out, often finding missing links.

And I talk to people. Articulation of implicit bits and pieces mixed with unpredictability of someone else’s mind and fun of a conversation do wonders.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/05.html#a1795; comments are here.

• Hyperlinks are the currency of the internet
• Edges
• Power of articulation

Via James Robertson – Expertise location without technology by Shawn Callahan. The piece I picked up was on defining expertise:

…expertise is more than simply possessing a skill. Klein describes eight aspects of expertise which I’ve summarised but would recommend you read Klein [Klein, G. 1998. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.].

1. Patterns: with experience experts can discern patterns that are invisible to novices. They have a good sense of what’s typical and can therefore detect the extraordinary.
2. Anomalies: experts are surprised when a key event is absent while novices don’t know what is supposed to happen and therefore don’t pick up on the anomaly.
3. The way things work: experts have mental models of how things work—how teams are supposed to work, equipment is supposed to function, power and politics is normally wielded.
4. Opportunities and improvisations: Experts can imagine possibilities that contradict the prevailing viewpoint and data. They can also apply patterns from one context to a new situation creating new approaches and techniques.
5. Past and future: experts can predict what might happen in the future. Just ask a grade 5 teacher about what the kids will be like at the beginning and the end of the year.
6. Fine discriminations: experts can see differences which remain invisible to novices. Just think of expert wine tasters.
7. Self aware: experts are aware of their own thought processes.
8. Decision makers: experts can make decisions under time pressure.

Which in a funny way connects to my thinking of researcher’s role in research – for example, differences that would emerge if a particular dataset is analysed by novice vs. expert.

And it comes back to my long-time burning question – what is methodologically sound way for recognising patterns, anomalies, opportunities, fine discriminations in an expert way?

If expertise is difficult to articulate, how would you specify (for example) explicit coding criteria to pinpoint patterns? How far the need to make things explicit, to categorise beforehand would ruin the richness of what could be found? How far the decisions on what are the patterns could be logically explained? How easily the process itself could be articulated for an examination by others?

How the world full of complexity and emergent things could be simplified to a clean-and-clear logic of a methodologically sound process?

Thinking of Making a Mess with Method by John Law and wondering why the hell I can’t do something easy – focusing on content instead of methodology… I guess I’m still in search of that particular messy method that fits the way I deal with the world and of a scientific environment where I don’t have to defend it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/30.html#a1791; comments are here.

• Good research…
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography
• My pattern-recognition techniques

A slightly edited/linked piece from my proposal for Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2005 (and I’m very excited to be invited :) I have been planning to write a proper weblog post around bullet points at the end, but it’s not happenning fast, so I just post it as it is and come back to it later.

Although weblogs are perceived as low-threshold tools to publish on-line, empowering individual expression in public, there is growing evidence of social structures evolving around weblogs and their influence on norms and practices of blogging. This evidence ranges from voices of bloggers themselves speaking about the social effects of blogging, to studies on specific weblog communities with distinct cultures (e.g. knitting community or goth community), to mathematical analysis of links between weblogs indicating that community formation in the blogosphere is not a random process, but an indication of shared interests binding bloggers together (Kumar, Novak, Raghaven, & Tomkins, 2003).

Social structures emerging around weblogs are interesting for a number of reasons. Weblogs provide spaces for both individual expression and control, and interactions within social ecosystem; hence providing insights of interplays between practices of networked individuals (Wellman, 2002, .pdf) and social structures where those individuals belong. While some weblog communities mirror existing social structures, others emerge when strangers find each other and connect. Weblogs do not provide a shared space with central topic or activity to be attracted to, nor (often) pre-existing community, but do support emergent social connections.

The nature of those connections is especially interesting, since understanding them can help to design environments to support emergence of social structures without predefining their focus or membership. From this perspective blogging is similar to “life between buildings” in a real city that “an opportunity to be with others in a relaxed and undemanding way”. This quote comes from architect Jan Gehl (2001) who discusses how to design public spaces that welcome and support social life.

While reading Gehl’s work I couldn’t avoid associations with insights about “individual in a public space” from my own research (I study uses and effects of blogging for personal knowledge management). I’d like to draw on parallels between real cities and the world of blogging and propose characteristics of a space that supports emergent social activities:

• comfortable, protected space
• conditions for longer-term activities meaningful for an individual
• “soft-edges”, easy switch between inward and outward oriented activities
• opportunities for low-intensity contact: exposure and lurking without a commitment
• “shared space” in between, to move social activity when it grows

These characteristics could be illustrated with examples from other social software applications (del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.) next to weblogs, so I guess they provide a good start for a discussion.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/18.html#a1526; comments are here.

• Blog networking study: publishing vs. interaction
• Distributed Agile: communication and common ground
• Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of weblogs

In my yesterday’s post on Blogging as creating space for important I mentioned that “I can go into a body of research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation, but I wouldn’t”. Well, BensonBear asks to do so:

No, please go into the body of reasearch on how artefacts support thinking. Perhaps point to a survey paper? If you are not familiar, look up Andy Clark’s work in philosophy of mind on “linguistic scaffolding”.

Don’t think that I’m ready for a proper literature review :) Actually, my thinking on roles, interplay and affordances of physical and digital artefacts in thinking and communication is heavily based on knowledge work/personal information management research – studies indicating how paper and digital documents, as well as their organisation in time and space support thinking and communication.

A good way to start it to read these:

• Kidd, A. (1994). The marks are on the knowledge worker (.pdf). Proceedings of CHI ’94. Boston: ACM Press.
• Sellen, A. J., & Harper, R. H. R. (2001). The Myth of the Paperless Office. The MIT Press.

The first one is a good introduction to the role of documents for informing thinking (~ turning information into knowledge). The second is a must read book for many reasons, but especially for understanding the role of paper and digital documents at work.

Personal information management is a more complicated issue – there is a lot of interesting things to read there. A good overview could be found in

• Boardman, R. & Sasse, M. A. (2004): “Stuff goes into the computer and doesn’t come out”: a cross-tool study of personal information management (.pdf). Proceedings of CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria, April 20-24, pp. 583-590.

In fact, Richard Boardman keeps PIM bibliography and finished his PhD on PIM in 2004, so his dissertation is a very good starting point for the topic (I’m reading it :). Unfortunately, his site is down at the moment and I have no idea if it’s permanent or not.

The proposal of BensonBear seems to complement my current reading pretty well, as I didn’t look much into the literature on cognitive processes that would explain why reliance on artefacts (as observed in PIM literature) happens.

I looked at papers by Andy Clark and this one seems to be relevant:

• Clark, A. (1998). Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation (.pdf). P. Carruthers and J. Boucher (Eds) Language And Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998, pp. 62-183.

I just scanned it, but especially this seems to be very relevant – “six broad ways in which linguistic artifacts can complement the activity of pattern-completing brain”:

• Memory augmentation
• Environmental simplification
• Coordination and the reduction of online-deliberation
• Taming path-dependent learning
• Attention and resource allocation
• Data manipulation and representation

I know that these sounds a bit too scientific, but I didn’t have enough time to read the paper properly to add human-readable commentaries :)

Anyway, if you know more research relevant, please, let me know.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/22.html#a1501; comments are here.

• What happens once you see patterns in the mess of traces you and others leave?
• IPKM: Inter-Personal Knowledge Management
• Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing

Andy Boyd:

Isn’t it great how explaining yourself outloud to others, allows you to self reflect better then mulling it over in your own mind.

Me:

I always need a conversation for growing my ideas. This is the main reason I blog. Even if no one comments, blogging makes it a conversation: I come to the idea next day and I can discuss it with “yesterday’s Lilia” :) Of course, articulation helps growing ideas as well.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/17.html#a1432; comments are here.

• Critical friend
• Developing reflexivity
• Research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation