Mathemagenic

I thought of writing this post for quite some time already - as a counterbalance for enthusiastic speaking about blogging (others tend to percieve me as more optimistic about weblogs than I actually am :)

So, how blogging makes my (research) life difficult:

I can’t pretend that I don’t know about a particular stream on blogging research while writing a literature overview - there are always signals coming from the blogosphere saying that it’s there. I’m learning to be handle it.

I’m so used to the constant feedback loop that I’d rather figure out how to embrace it than let myself be methodologically “clean” to avoid “contaminating the data”.

Being able to tag emergent themes for ages in my weblog and del.icio.us I find difficult sticking to any strict coding categories - I’m spoiled by an opportunity to extend tags at any moment.

I had an experience of watching how other (”competitor”) weblog researcher submitted their papers to a conference. I did too. Then I was watching their happy “accepted” posts while I didn’t have any reviewer feedback yet.

I see a lot of good work in progress. Sometimes it makes me loosing confidence about my own work.

My peer network spans across many boundaries. Sometimes it makes me feel that I don’t know anymore what is my own field.

***

All that said - I have more to enjoy than to complain. Where else would you feel so much embedded into a learning network?

And, as an alternative view: a picture that comes out when Anjo runs his text analysis tools on my blog posts that talk about blogging as research.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/29.html#a1749; comments are here.

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As promised: podcasts from my presentation on researching blogs and blogging research:

• part one (13,9MB)
• part two (11,8MB)

All hard work is done by Mark - thanks a lot!

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/28.html#a1594; comments are here.

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Notes for my talk about blog research and research blogs at NERDI.

• Slides (.pdf) - there is not that much there, mainly drawings :)
• Podcasts (thanks to Mark!)

• part one (13,9MB)
• part two (11,8MB)

I wasn’t sure where to start the talk when I realised that it’s exactly 3 years since I started blogging. So, my main question is:

What my weblog did to my research in those three years?

I started from using my blog as an online scrapbook, collecting ideas, links and quotes in one place where I could easily find things back.

• Time to reflect: my uses of weblog (after two month of blogging)
• It takes courage to blog (after three month)

Than I discovered that there is more to it – a growing community of people with similar interests and rewarding dialogues.

• Why blogging 2
• Weblog networks as social ecosystems (black and orange diagrams explaining how I think it works)
• Some stories illustrating social connections
  • Weblog networking: recognised by a question
  • Blogging and paper writing - on getting help with reviewing a paper from my community

Over time I also realised that weblog can also be a looking glass to study knowledge work (this is where weblogs came into my PhD research).

• BlogTalk paper: final version and a bit of reflection - background story
• 7 pages description of my PhD research - end 2003 - beginning 2004; with weblogs added to the mix
• Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case - paper which first results

It was when I finished that paper when I realised that while my insights were inspired by the answers I’ve got in the study, “connecting the dots” came not from the data, but from personal experiences of blogging. I started to look for ways to accommodate for that in my research, turning blogging into an ethnographic space.

• PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory

Before that blogging and researching blogs were somewhat separate, but I couldn’t avoid collision, getting into a situation where two roles conflicted.

• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• Researcher vs. blogger: researcher influence

In a search for a solution I started to think on conditions where blogging and researching would live peacefully together. What if and how blogging could be a research instrument?

• Two papers, me in between - on discovering authoethnography
• Weblog as a research notebook (3): my own experiences - on fieldnotes
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography

This is where I am now (and I probably should write another post about it :).

I don’t know what my weblog will do to my research next few years. I hope that it will be kind enough to let me finish my PhD before turning more things upside down :)

Re: other things that we have discussed:

• Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?
• Blogging as creating space for important
• BlogTalk paper: personal characteristics that support blogging
• BlogTalk paper: job characteristics that support blogging
• My papers that could be interesting
  • Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks
  • Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks
  • An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations (2) (weblog conversations vs. forum conversations)
  • Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices (follow-up with more analysis)
  • Our BlogTalk paper: Shared conceptualisations in weblogs

More:

• Why do academics blog? (references to blog posts, papers and other collections)
• What I told the tenure committee
• Flipping the Question:”Why DON’T Academics Blog?”
• What do bloggers blog about, actually?
• Scholblog network
• del.icio.us/mathemagenic/researcherBlog (my collection of links on research blogs)

Papers:

• Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool
• Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/21.html#a1590; comments are here.

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It’s titled Lecture/debate on weblogs and the different shapes and colours of academic blogging and hosted by Networked Research and Digital Information (Nerdi), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I’ll be talking about researching blogs and blogging research, more or less as the abstract says:

For a researcher who starts studying weblogs getting hands-on experience in blogging may be a natural step, either as part of learning about new phenomenon, as a way to engage in conversations with other weblog researchers or as a conscious choice for participatory research methods. In either case the lines between the “blogger who does research” and the “researcher who blogs” are getting blurred.
In this presentation Lilia Efimova will provide an overview of the weblog research field and talk about the different shapes and colours of academic blogging.

The details you may want to know:

• Tuesday June 21 at 14.00 hrs + the entrance is free + you are very welcome :)
• ISHSS Building, room D (1st Floor)
• Prins Hendrikkade 189-B, 1011 TD, Amsterdam + directions

I’ll try to make more debate than lecture out of it. I’ll also post slides online and will try blog something, but hope someone else will blog it too as I can’t write while talking :)

On a practical side: do you have any specific questions/issues you believe I should cover?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/14.html#a1585; comments are here.

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I was a bit mixed up after finding out that I was being researched by students as part of their assignment. Not because I’m uncomfortable with it. I’m pretty aware that my weblog is “out there” for others to study, I participated in a few weblog studies as a “case” and I’m always glad to “return” the favor even if it’s not directly to those whom I study.

Being uncomfortable comes from a feeling of intrusion into a private space - the girls researching me didn’t expect me to start studying them in turn. “Intrusion discomfort” came not so much from doing background search work (at the end what I found was published openly on the web), but from letting them know that I found them when I blogged it. I thought that they would be uncomfortable knowing that they are being watched, so I became uncomfortable myself thinking of that :)

I found kind of a middle ground. I didn’t blog any direct links and names, so at least their work didn’t get exposed to more people (don’t think others had many reasons to get curious enough about the issue to do the same background connections I did). And I didn’t look in the wiki pages about myself untill reading today in weblog of one of the authors that the assignment was finished. And, yes, somehow I didn’t have any problem subscribing to weblogs of both students.

The reason I’m writing about this that it’s unusual. Usually I wouldn’t have any problem linking to most of weblogs/wiki pages I find online, even if they are about myself. So, I wonder why I’m different this time…

It’s definitely has some connection with blog research ethics, or, probably just with blog ethics. Something around: “don’t bring into a spotlight those who think they are in a private space if you think they may not like it”.

Another reason is that it was an assignment in a course. I didn’t want to mess up whatever goals Adrian has for the assignment and I didn’t want to make it too complicated for the students.

Anyway, I’m wondering what Adrian Miles and the students would say: did I do more harm or good with putting my nose into this whole thing? could I take more freedom and link directly to students and their work? can I do it now when it’s finished?

As for me that was a nice experience:

• I thought more on how blurry are the boundaries between researcher and researched in the weblog (online?) world
• I made an interesting observation while participating in the interview that was part of the assignment, which turned into insightful comments from Lois, which have potential of turning into research questions
• While checking wiki pages about myself I found highlighted an aspect of my work that I probably should focus more and some additional reading on the topic

And this is one more illustration why I find mixing blogging and research so fun and so rewarding :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/05/04.html#a1573; comments are here.

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I was pretty excited when I read this a few days ago (via pointer from one of Andrea Handl pages, but lost where exactly):

The central method, or bundle of methods, of this project is ‘thick participation’ (Spittler 2001), the radicalized form of ‘participant observation’ as brought to anthropology by Rivers (????) and Malinowski (1922, 1926).

According to Gerd Spittler ‘thick participation’ ” implies apprenticeship and practice, natural conversation and observation, lived experience and sensuous research. Because this powerful method is time consuming it is less threatened by its critics than by bureaucratic grant restriction.” (2001:1)

The project is ‘open research’ in several dimensions. My website and weblog simultaneously serve multiple purposes: they are my notebook, writing desk and multimedia online filing system, they maintain world/webwide communication about the ongoing project with fellow scientists, they present my project to a wider public, and — above all — both constitute a part of the communication and interaction with the members of “my cyberian tribe”. Website and weblog accompanying the project constitute a fusion between spheres, which normally are well seperated in anthropological research: field-data, informal scientific discussion, public-relations work, and a part of the field itself. This diverse groups have access to the same dynamic and interactive material, which contains some risks: What appears perfectly sound to e.g. a game-modder may seem awkward to a scientist and vice versa. My reputation in the modding-community as well as in the scientific community may be at stake — a fellow-modder jokingly already named me “teh intellectuale” (int. missp. for “THE Intellectual”).

This is maxmode-work-in-progress by Alexander Knorr aka zephyrin_xirdal (weblog). See also list of references (re: online ethnography and things around).

Few things:

• Nice to see that I’m not alone in bridging separated spheres :)
• Thick participation is something I’m going to look at. Unfortunately the reference seems to be in German.
• It’s great example of writing online. Wonder if I can find tools that would work for me - PhD wiki is a very tempting idea, but I’m not sure it would fit well between work in progress hypertext of weblog and linear documents I need for publications. I still write and edit bigger pieces in Word, not sure if wiki would be a nice addition…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/13.html#a1545; comments are here.

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During a really nice conversation on my PhD with Janine I thought of a picture explaining how blogging is related to all other things. Not sure if it’s self-explanatory, but it was fun to draw :)

Studies are about research I do. Some of them are on weblogs and those usually part of my PhD. Others are part of my work next to the PhD and they could are on all kinds of knowledge management topics (e.g. searching for in-house knowledge or information overload…)

Publications are external resources that I read. Some of them are on weblogs, but others not.

Developing ideas is my main value-added activity :) Usually they are tested in the studies, which are informed by publications I read (and many other things not in this picture :)

Blogging is a way to connect pieces of all (not everything) in one space. In this sense my weblog is an external snapshot of my brain where all those things live articulated and linked.

***

This picture started as an attempt to provide a visual view on my PhD methodology. It didn’t work that way, but it shows one important thing: there is no clear cut between my PhD and all other things I read and do.

So: one day I’ll have to add PhD borders on this picture - to decide which influences are strong enough to be described in my dissertation and which could be ingnored. I have to stay withing the genre boundaries, so can’t put my whole life in my dissertation :) Fortunately weblog is much more flexible and much more forgiving (and I’ll know one day if it’s much more rewarding or not :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/12.html#a1543; comments are here.

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In the previous post I discussed possible types of research notes for ethnographic research of blogging practices. This one is a reflection on research notes I have for my research (which wasn’t designed as an ethnography).

artifacts

• when participating: link or quote in my weblog
• when observing: adding to del.icio.us collection

process knowledge

• when participating: indicators or summaries in my weblog
• when observing: not documented

personal experience of observation/participation

• I blog heavily on it, but not about all the things relevant (due to the lack of time or sensitivity)

emerging interpretations and ad-hoc analysis

• I blog heavily on it, but not about all the things relevant (due to the lack of time or sensitivity)

coding and analysis

• coding
  • emergent coding is part of blogging/bookmarking - I use weblog topics and del.icio.us links for it (see everyday grounded theory)
  • final coding - offline, usually on paper (till I find a good software)
• analysis usually happens “behind the curtains”
  • partly documented in papers I write (see example of paper/real life balance in researcher vs. blogger)
  • partly documented in weblog posts, usually as articulation of specific problems I have to tackle during the analysis (e.g. Guessing if a link leads to a weblog or not? or What would be a good way to find all (blog) pages linking to a specific blog post?)

All kinds of issues with my research notes:

My data (artifacts) are not stored locally - there are obvious risks and unconviniencies involved.

Huge part of process knowledge is not documented. Of course, having experience and access to artifacts helps to recall and reconstruct, but relying on memory could be a problem.

Obviousely, I do not write down all things relevant (experiences, analysis). Wonder how different are those that I wrote and those I didn’t. May be there are structural differences.

What is very different from other ethnographies (if looking at my reseacrh through ethnography lenses) - personal experiences and analysis are documented in public, feeding back to the blogosphere and influencing (see more on researcher influence in my research).

The bottom line: wonder if ethnographic lenses make sense for my research and what/how much I have to change if I adopt them.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/07.html#a1537; comments are here.

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[Continued from Weblog as a research notebook (1): reading 'Life online' and del.icio.us as bookmarking history]

Next to the “Life online” I’m reading Virtual ethnography by Christine Hine (also: reviews) and Ethnography: Principles in practice by Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson. The first one is a “difficult to read” introduction to ethnographic research online, but it also says a lot about ethnography offline and connections between those two. The second is much easier to read. I really enjoy it and I guess will order my own copy.

Hammersley and Atkinson distinguish between fieldnotes and fieldwork journals. Fieldnotes are documentaries of observations in the field, while fieldwork journals are about documenting researchers’ emotions and involvement, as well as emergent interpretations and analysis of the data.

The distinctions are similar to reporting vs. reflecting styles of conference blogging. One is about documenting events as they are (although this is anyway subjective :), while another is about adding the next layer - emotions, associations, assumptions of what is behind the case and so on.

For the time being I’d like to leave online/offline connections aside and focus only on thinking about types of research notes one can make while studying blogging practices. I could think of several levels:

Artifacts. The nice side of studying online phenomenon is that interactions are documented digitally anyway - one could study weblogs, weblog posts, links between those, data of various tracking tools, etc.

Although artifacts alone may not be enough for understanding blogging. One may need to observe “interaction in action” rather than archives or participate actively to gain understanding of the phenomenon through personal experience. I discussed it in Archaeology and ethnography in weblog research (1) and (2), but found similar discussion and references in Virtual ethnography as well (pp. 22-25).

Next to that there is reflective meta-level: notes on emerging interpretations and ad-hoc analysis. And, at the later stage, some kind of coding and analysis.

Now to documenting those things:

• artifacts - transcripts of “who blogged what when”
  • do not need to be documented - created by bloggers “out there” on the web
  • have to be found
  • may dissappear, so researcher may choose to have a copy locally (publicly, e.g. as a quote in own weblog, or privately, in whatever software)
• process knowledge - “interaction in action”, hidden or dissapearing aspects of weblog interaction (e.g. back channel communication or deleted posts)
  • partially documented by bloggers - in posts that include references to backchanneling or in summaries (examples are in this paper)
  • may be traced by weblog tracking tools
  • not necessarily documented fully and may need researcher’s work to observe and write down
• personal experience of observation/participation
  • definitely need researcher’s presence and documenting work
• emerging interpretations and ad-hoc analysis
  • researcher’s work anyway :)
• coding and analysis
  • something researcher does once data collection is over

Choices for documenting:

• what? - pointers (links to relevant material) or full-text
• how? - paper or digital
• where? - one space (all types of notes together) or multiple spaces
• for whom? - public (accessible for others) or private

[One more post follows]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/07.html#a1536; comments are here.

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I’m reading through several books on ethnography, switching back and forth, thinking about all kinds of connections to my research. This post is a bit of reflection about research notetaking in ethnography and my uses of weblog in this respect.

I started to read from Life online: Researching real experience in virtual space by Annette Markham. I met Annette at AOIR 5.0 last year, but then I didn’t anticipated that her work would be that relevant for me (my del.icio.us shows* that I was browsing through her papers while preparing for the conference). This time I picked up the reference to her book from autoethnography chapter by Ellis and Bochner. Funny - how much you need the “right moment” to see things in front of your eyes - how much your current mindset becomes lenses that sift through the world around you.

Anyway, I got the book. I’m still getting used to the reflective ethnographic writing in it, so just two observations.

1. Having met the people behind the book makes reading experience totally different. I met Annette and talked to her briefly, but I also met one of her respondents, Terry Senft (later: found that book excerpt with Terry being interviewed by Annette is online). I have a sense of knowing Terry much better since I lurk in her blog (journal?) as well. I guess what changes the experience is not only the fact of meeting Annette and Terry, but observing them two interacting, sensing a close friendship between or knowing that Terry joins (joined?) Annette at Virgin Islands for half a year.

It’s like discovering the roots of the relation while having a sense of what it came to be… Like reading a book from the end… Funny - I experienced similar feelings while reading my own weblog yesterday, seeing older posts in the light of knowledge of now - ideas and relations that grew out of those seeds.

2. (which is supposed to be the topic of this post :) I realised how heavily Annette relies on her research notes: visibly, by including them next to transcripts, and invisibly, by (I guess) using them to reconstruct the process of interviewing as well as emotions and thoughts around it.

I tried to put myself into her shoes, thinking of how I would write about my research this way, and realised that I’m in trouble.

I have a lot written down or captured in one form or another, but this is definitely not enough to reconstruct my experiences.

[And now I decide to continue in another post :)]

* Of course del.icio.us is not intended to be used as a trace of bookmarking history - there is no way to get permanent link to a page showing that I bookmarked Annette’s homepage on 14 September 2004. Now the link is at http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/people/3 or http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/ethnography/2 or http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/papers/10 - and all of these will change as I add more bookmarks on respective topics**.

** And while I was typing this I found out that there is a way to link to the evidence :) It’s the history of bookmarks for Annette’s homepage. Unlike other del.icio.us pages url pages are not separated by multiple screens (extreme example).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/04/07.html#a1535; comments are here.

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