This piece is from my dissertation. It is a reconstruction of events, readings and weblog posts that shaped my understanding of the research ethics in relation to my PhD research.

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.

• Bibliography conventions when writing on weblogs
• Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text
• When they read what we write: respondent identification

The deadline for submitting this paper was just a couple of weeks before the due date for my dissertation, so I hesitated a lot deciding to work on it. I’m glad I did: it provided a great opportunity to transform the insights from the study of my own practices of using weblog as an instrument to develop PhD ideas (Chapter 3 of the dissertation) into something that can live its own life.

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. 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.]

See also: short, practitioner oriented version of the insights from this paper – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas

• Personal <i>something</i> management from my PhD perspective
• OKLC04: my presentation
• Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers (my PhD dissertation)

In case you were wondering: I’m almost there, submitting dissertation in two weeks. I can not wait to share it, but it will take a while before I have a version to post online (I guess in April). So, for those who do not want to wait that long I have conclusions of my PhD research in two versions.

The short version in this post describes blogging practices of knowledge workers in respect to specific parts of the framework below that provides a view on what knowledge work entails. The long version includes that plus summaries of the relevant results from the studies I did. Both are from a draft of the final chapter of the dissertation. [Update: see also final version of the dissertation]

Ideas

• Weblogs are used to maintain awareness of the ideas “out there” through reading in small bites, using weblogs of others as trusted sources and own network as a filter.
• Weblogs provide a space for articulating and capturing ideas that might be undocumented or hidden in private collections otherwise, parking them in a trusted external repository shared with others.
• Blogging is used for sense-making supported by writing, multiple ways to organise and assess one’s own blog posts and conversations with other bloggers.
• When developing ideas the person-centric and open-ended nature of blogging brings unexpected insights that cross topical boundaries.
• Over time ideas captured and organised in weblogs provide a fertile ground for reflection and reuse.

Conversations

• Weblog conversations are informed by and embedded into histories of writing in individual weblogs as well as history of interactions and relations between participating bloggers. Those contexts are not necessarily explicit and visible to everyone who participates.
• Since weblog conversations involve communicating via comments to a specific weblog and via linking across weblogs they are fragmented and distributed over multiple weblogs. In addition, those conversations may be supplemented by interacting via other media. The distributed and fragmented nature of weblog conversations results in exposure to different audiences, crossing multiple topics, combining individual input and the power of dialogue.
• In comparison to other tools, participation in weblog conversations requires extra effort that includes manually connecting conversational fragments by linking, and well as creating and maintaining an overview of those fragments. This effort limits the scale or frequencies of such conversations and also makes them more likely to happen within densely-knit networks of bloggers.
• Weblogs provide a possibility for an occasional interaction rather than support constant conversations. They are not particularly suitable for goal-oriented conversations, but provide a fertile ground for exploring ideas, especially those that cross topical boundaries or where the interests of others are not known in advance.
• Participation in weblog conversations contributes to developing ideas and relations that often cross boundaries and exclude intermediaries.

Relations

• Personal nature of blogging plays an important role in establishing professional connections. Weblogs are often treated as online representations of their authors, living business cards.
• Weblogs are used for establishing and maintaining both, personal relations with other bloggers and informational relations that involve treating other bloggers as trusted information source without engaging in person.
• In both cases it is “connecting through content“, where the person-centric nature of blogging plays an important role in establishing trust (either in blogger as a person or as an information source) and connecting across boundaries.
• Networking via weblogs is enabled by publishing and interaction. Publishing allows efficient broadcasting on a variety of topics to often unknown audiences and is essential for being present as a blogger, getting to know others and making informed choices about engaging with them, and as a low-key way to stay in touch. While bloggers do not actively interact all the time, it is the conversations between them over time that help to establish personal bonds that eventually enable getting things done together.
• While personal relations are often initially established via blogging, over time multiple channels come into play to monitor others and to interact with them.

Tasks

• The open-ended and public nature of weblogs does not necessarily makes them a good tool to work directly on tasks, so in most cases weblogs are used for enabling work, rather than doing it. Weblogs influence one’s work indirectly when they are used for developing ideas, engaging in conversations and establishing relations that might be needed in the future:
  • documented ideas might be reused and reworked, accelerating working on tasks;
  • relations with others make it possible to engage them when needed;
  • conversations result in unexpected ideas and relations that can turn into new projects or contribute to the on-going ones.
• Blogging might became more closely integrated with one’s work when it requires working on tasks that match the medium, for example, those that require documenting potentially useful ideas, relationship building or communicating to a broad audience.
• While in some cases blogging might become the required way to perform one’s work or a focus of it, in most cases it is added to a pool of various tools one can use to work on a task. Knowledge workers choose to use blogging as an instrument when it works for them and do it intentionally, ad-hoc or in retrospect.

Context

• Blogging on professionally interesting topics often results in a degree of integration with work, even when started without such an intention. In business settings blogging is neither purely individual nor business-driven – the choices that shape a particular weblog are multifaceted and weblogs of individual knowledge workers are positioned on various places between the extremes.
• Bloggers have to deal with the effects of visibility that comes as a result of blogging. While visibility might be a driving force for blogging and a reason for many positive effects it brings (e.g. ideas and people being found) it also comes with challenges of dealing with expansion of networks and information overload, changes in power distribution when crossing hierarchical or organisational boundaries, raised expectations and making mistakes in public.
• Given that blogging is shaped by and useful in different contexts that often result in incomparable requirements, bloggers have to make choices and draw the boundaries deciding if they blog for themselves or others, do it for connecting with peers or a business gain, or how personal their work-related weblog should be.
• Blogging is creating microcontent, but the value of it is in the connections and patterns across those fragments over time. It is also efficient in exposing a blogger to a great number of ideas and people across various boundaries. So, learning to deal with fragmentation and abundance is part of blogging practices.
• Choosing, managing and ‘working around’ tools is part of blogging. Next to making choices about the technology set-up for their weblogs when starting, bloggers constantly deal with making choices about media to engage with others. Various tools used for that purpose require the effort of maintaining contacts across them and learning how to maximise their potential and account for limitations.

• New KM blog: Dubbings and Diversions by Jeremy Aarons
• Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?
• Knowledge networker needs (2)

While I didn’t blogged, I read weblogs. Big share of those are on parenting-related themes. One of the trends that I was surprised to see is how many of those are into “pro-blogging” – blogging not only for the fun of it, but also for some business-related purposes (some links are here).

This seems to the case for “weblogs in general” too – I come across more and more advice on pro-blogging. Reading it I realise how much what I do with my weblog is guided by other choices and principles: I prefer not to define goals and strategies for blogging and while I’m glad to have readers, I do not spend much time putting on paper who is my audience and how exactly my weblog will make it happy.

And, on the top of it, I get annoyed when blogging is conceptualised primarily as a medium for public communication (especially with microphones or megaphones as a visual metaphor ;). So, working on a PhD chapter that describes my own blogging practices, I wanted to show the other side of it – blogging for myself. Below is a slightly edited piece from the current draft.

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Blogging is frequently viewed as a medium for public communication: it is reasonable to assume that those who do not want their words to be read by a broad audience would use another medium. However, while the need to communicate is a part of blogging, it is not necessary the primarily reason for it.

In my case blogging grew out of a need for a place to organise my thinking and exploration; the readers, as well as writing for them, appeared later. While the public nature of blogging was the factor I took into account from the beginning of it, the primary force that shaped it was its usefulness for myself.

In the process of balancing my own needs and interests with those of my potential readers when blogging I often make choices to serve my own interests first. Those choices shaped my blogging practices in multiple ways.

Work-in-progress instead of polished pieces. Although a weblog readers are more likely to benefit from well-thought and carefully crafted posts, my need for capturing ideas at their early stages resulted in writing quick work-in-progress memos. Using weblog for a quick documentation, often squeezed between working on other task also resulted in writing many relatively short posts, connected by links. While it provides a trail of connected ideas that works for my own purposes, it is more difficult to follow and to make sense of for a reader, who could probably benefit more from reading a longer entry that would connect several linked posts into a coherent whole.

Fragmented weblog focus. When started, my weblog was focused primarily on the topics related to learning and knowledge management. Over time my writing shifted to other topics, potentially alienating loyal readers. While I was “not sure that reading all methodology ‘thinking aloud’ is that fun” (quoted from this post) it was essential for my learning process, so it became relatively big part of the weblog content. Currently, the content of my weblog is pretty fragmented as it reflects the change of my interests and topics I worked on over time.

“Selfish” tagging. Another dimension where the choices between my own interests and those of an external audience appeared was using tags for organising my own posts. While I had multiple opportunities to use tags that would help users of external systems to find relevant entries in my weblog, I haven’t used them since this would mean losing personally meaningful tag-based navigation in my weblog. The choice of terms to use as tags is also influenced primarily by their relevance for my own thinking practice.

The reasons for choosing to serve my own needs before those of my audience are twofold:

• Serving the needs of others might make blogging meaningless for myself. For example, writing only on a narrow set of topics in the weblog defeats the initial purpose of blogging to collect in one place fragmented bits relevant to my thinking.
• In my case too much dependence on the audience is proved to be paralysing: I would spend too much time trying to figure out for whom exactly to write and what their needs might be (a bit more on writing for non-existing audience). Also, non-intrusive nature of blogging (e.g. compared to the email that is delivered to the mailboxes) means that there is no necessarily an audience for a specific post, so writing to serve others in this case feels similar to giving a presentation in an empty room.

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Other bloggers on related issues:

• Don’t Tell Me How To Blog
• Your Blog Archives: To Cull or Not to Cull?
• The luxury of pupose-less blogging can be a good thing

• Weblog research ethics
• Personal ways of doing things in public
• Personal side of social media: learning from weblogs