Working on a paper on how I bring blogging in the text of my dissertation, I finally get to write a bit more on When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography promised long time ago. Although the book is well worth reading as a whole for anyone interested in relations between a researcher and those participating in the research, one of the papers is a must read for those studying bloggers:

• Sheehan, Elizabeth A. (1993). The student of culture and the ethnography of Irish intellectuals. In C.B.Brettell (Ed.), When they read what we write: the politics of ethnography (pp. 75-89). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

In the paper the author tells about the challenges of representing in a research report academics she studied: public intellectuals, “who earn their living in large part through their ideas” (p. 81).

It is a cliché to say that knowledge is power, but in the case of informants who are intellectuals, knowledge is also capital, symbolic and otherwise. Here too the boundaries between public and private forms of information become confused, merge, and cross over to opposite sides in the exchange between anthropologist and informant. As a results, ethnographic writing about academics and intellectuals raises serious issues of intellectual attribution. [...] As intellectuals, many academics create their lives through their work, and their work through their lives. Interviews with such information can provide exhilarating insight for the ethnographer (Yes! Yes! This is what I mean!), brought to a sudden halt by the realization that the ideas you are now thinking – and thinking of writing about – are not entirely your own at all but the product of mutual intellectual exchange. How to you correctly ascribe ideas that are offered within the context of an interview but which may also be the basis of new works, new publications? How do you separate the public thinker from the private, honour his confidentiality and intellectual property, and still offer a meaningful analysis? (Sheehan,1993, p.81)

This one has direct connections to my early questions on weblog research ethics in respect to he choices between protecting privacy of the participants and recognising their authorship. Browsing through the referrals to my post on attribution and ownership of ideas when blogging research I came across a nice summary of the issue from a research participant side in a post by Frank Carver (bold is mine):

One of my current concerns is the tension between perceived needs one the one hand for attribution, academic traceability and ownership of ones own words; and on the other hand for privacy. This is seen in sharpest relief in solicitations for academic surveys. Routinely such instruments come with a disclaimer pointing out that all answers will be anonymous. Well-structured surveys and questionnaires, though, often also contain a section for general comments and feedback. In most cases I do not want this to be anonymous – indeed I would rather it formed part of a dialogue between the researcher and subjects, allowing both to benefit, learn and develop.

I am considering taking up a habit of always adding my contact details to academic survey submissions to deliberately challenge the assumption that I wish to be an anonymous donor of information, and to encourage researchers to participate in a community of interest.

The stress on mutual benefits is important: often it’s not only the researcher who learns new things, but also people who participate in the research, when their thinking on a subject is triggered as a result of an interaction. Elizabeth Sheehan gives a nice example that the challenges of attributing the ideas in a case like this one may also exist on the participant’s side:

I might add that this process can work both ways, but with less ethical difficulty for the informant. I was both flattered and dismayed to see some insights of mine appear in the Irish Times, unattributed, under the byline of an academic I had interviewed a few days earlier. He had no need, as had I, to sort out his ides from my own in a setting which was, for him, just and interesting discussion with another academic. (Sheehan,1993, p.81)

Another issue that the paper touches is the one I had to deal myself: the need to represent research participants in a way that multiple parts of their input could not be attributed to the same person (in When they read what we write: respondent identification). An example from the paper:

…his identity had to be fragmented. In the dissertation he becomes several people, not my the questionable device of pretending he was really a number of different individuals, but simply by my failing to inform the reader that “one professor,” “another commentator,” and so forth who appear throughout the dissertation are actually one person. Consequently, this single individual is discessed as the unnamber center of the appointment controversy, as an anonymous example of the links between scholarship and party politics, as an attributed commentator on his research discipline, and as a published sources on his research specialty. (Sheehan,1993, pp.83-84)

• Weblog as a research notebook (2): types of notes
• Virtual methods seminar
• PhD supervision: a bit of trust, a bit of imagination

Was going through all kinds of drafts for my PhD and thought that I should blog this piece. This is from a version of PhD outline (research questions, approach, etc.) dated 14 April 2006. It’s not going to end up in the dissertation in the current form, so I thought of publishing it – as an easy to find reminder from where I’m coming and as an example of how blogging got me into “write at least something if you can’t write a proper academic text” in communication with my advisers :)

Slightly edited for the web and to make it readable out of context.

Practical value. For me it’s important to make sure that my research has an impact on practice. Developing a better understanding of knowledge worker blogging practices could contribute to it in several ways:

• facilitating reflection of bloggers in figuring out other/better uses of weblogs and improving their own knowledge habits
• supporting any corporate stakeholders (for example, those responsible for KM initiatives) in decision-making around uses of weblogs by better understanding personal perspectives of people who blog
• supporting technology designers by describing patterns of (often unforeseen) uses of weblog technologies

To put this in a perspective: I see the results of my PhD as an important contribution on a way to productive uses of weblogs in knowledge-intensive settings. To do so there is a need to cross the chasm between early adopters and pragmatic majority (Moore, 1991), which is mainly done by articulating down-to-earth personal reasons to use weblogs and making sure weblog technology, as well as social and organisational practices around it are mature enough to fit in without too much hassle (in this respect I also draw on the literature on diffusion on innovation in educational domain, e.g. Rogers, 1995; Dormant, 1997).

It may look that I’m less concerned with the scientific/theory contribution of my PhD. It’s partly true, but partly comes from my belief that describing new phenomenon from an angle not well covered in the literature in a scientifically sound way makes a good PhD contribution.

I know that there is a lot of work and learning still ahead of me to make it a sound scientific contribution, but I have to admit that it’s an opportunity to impact practice that keep me working on it (for more extended discussion see On the role of theory, researcher accountability and translation).

Actor-perspective and crossing (multidisciplinary) boundaries. I believe that for both, knowledge work and weblogs, actor-perspective is important (and often neglected) view on the phenomenon. For me this research is about intersection of different contexts and activities of a person (knowledge worker who blogs). This often means crossing boundaries – between private and public, between passion and work-paid-for, between multiple personal knowledge management activities (e.g. organising ideas and managing relations with others), between multiple audiences who read a weblog…

It creates extra complexity and often unmanageable (especially given the multiple disciplines that say something relevant), but it’s also where I believe the most contributions will lay. This belief comes from several perspectives:

• the value of weblogs is probably about crossing boundaries and many specifics of weblog uses are not explained by one specific context/domain;
• thinking about possible improvements of weblog uses I’d like to aim at synergies rather than focusing on suboptimal optimisation;
• I read too much literature indicating that innovation happens on the edges :)

Given that I perceive my main challenge in this respect is to keep multidisciplinary perspective, while doing sound research within a manageable time frame.

Exploratory and reflective research. In my PhD I choose to do exploratory and reflective research. Partly due to my personal preferences to do so, but mainly due to the nature of the phenomenon I’m studying: complex, emerging and often invisible.

It’s a complex domain – blogging practices are shaped by a number of interacting factors, for example specifics of weblog tools used, personal preferences and working routines, social and organisational contexts. Weblog technologies and practices around them are still changing. In this case cause and effect relations are difficult to identify and predict; often they become obvious only in retrospect (retrospective coherence of Kurtz & Snowden (2003)). Methodologically I’m still working on finding a good way to explore emerging patterns and to identify forces that shape them.

There are also many invisible aspects of the domain: implicit knowledge worker needs, not accounted for knowledge processes, invisible blogging activities, hidden subculture-specific values, uses of weblogs discovered only by those who blog… In case of this research reflexivity (of the participants) is a way to tap into invisible (see Simons & Ruijters (2001) for an example in a context of implicit learning), but also as an additional quality check though reflexivity of the researcher.

Participatory research. In my case participatory research means two things: relying on my personal experiences as a blogger and frequent interaction with others, involving them as co-researchers.

Personal involvement is explained in a number of ways. First, treating my personal blogging practices as an additional data source provides me with a valuable input on invisible aspects of blogging, serves as a faster way of learning about blogging at work than any published research and give a starting point to many questions once I observe different “blogging behaviours” of other bloggers. Second, it gives me an identity between other bloggers and facilitates any engagement required for the research. Finally, it influences the way I collect, organise, analyse the data and present the results. It wasn’t intended so, but at the certain moment reflecting on the way I do research I realised how much my personal experience and involvement influences and enriches my findings (see Researching blogs and blogging research: synergies of colliding worlds and Not documenting, doing: blogging as research for more details).

Involving others can’t be avoided if you blog as a researcher: blogging is participation and co-constructing the practice (see Mortensen (2003) for similar discussion of her research through active participation in an online game). This involvement could be avoided by choosing to study a group of bloggers distant from myself. In fact, in two cases the distances between myself and bloggers I study are different: in one of them I made an effort to influence less, while in the other I embraced the participatory nature of it, learning about practices through participation.

Research paradigm. The choices above, while still implicit, were/are the main explanation behind my “stubbornness” in making specific choices on research questions, methods and ways to ensure and evaluate the quality of my research: I has been resisting suggestions that wouldn’t fit my implicitly chosen* research paradigm. It’s only now I start to articulate and position it – somewhere in between constructivist and participatory qualitative research according to Guba & Lincoln (2005)), but I’m still in the process.

References:

Dormant, D. (1997). Planning change: past, present, future. In R.Kaufman, S. Thiagarajan, & P. MacGillis (Eds.), The guidebook for performance improvement: Working with individuals and organizations. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Guba, E. G. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences. In N.K.Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 191-216). SAGE Publications.

Kurtz, C. & Snowden, D. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex-complicated world. IBM Systems Journal, 42, 462-483.

Moore, G. (1991). Crossing the chasm. HarperBusiness.

Mortensen, T. (2003). Reflexivity and participation in Online Games. In: Pleasures of the player: Flow and control in online games (pp. 69-93). Doctoral Dissertation, Volda College and University of Bergen.

Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations. (4 ed.) New York: The Free Press.

Simons, P. R. J. & Ruijters, M. C. P. (2001). Work-related learning: elaborate, extend, and externalise. In W.J.Nijhof & L. F. M. Nieuwenhuis (Eds.), The dynamics of VET and HRD systems (pp. 101-114). Enschede: Twente University press.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/07/31.html#a1926; comments are here.

• Paper writing: panic attack
• The ‘and’ way and the ‘but’ way
• Methodology chapter: Participation

Another piece of thought triggered by reading Uses of blogs (Posting with passion: Blogs and the politics of gender by Melissa Greg and What’s next for blogging? by Axel Bruns, expecially in respect to interview with Clancy Ratliff).

In Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs Susan Herring and others discuss the differences between actual blogging practices (in respect to weblog types and weblog author demographics) and representations of those in public discourses on weblogs:

Quantitative studies report as many (or more, depending on what one counts as a blog) female as male blog authors, and as many (or more) young people as adults (Henning, 2003; Orlowski, 2003), suggesting a diverse population of bloggers as regards gender and age representation. At the same time, as will be shown, contemporary discourses about weblogs, such as those propagated through the mainstream media, in scholarly communication, and in weblogs themselves, tend to disproportionately feature adult, male bloggers.

[...] Specifically, we propose that the apparent gender and age bias in contemporary discourses about weblogs arises in part as a result of focus on a particular blog type, the so-called ‘filter’ blog, which is produced mostly by adult males. We argue that by privileging filter blogs and thereby implicitly evaluating the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors, public discourses about weblogs marginalize the activities of women and teen bloggers, thereby indirectly reproducing societal sexism and ageism, and misrepresenting the fundamental nature of the weblog phenomenon.

Not being closely involved in the discussions on gender politics online, I would leave the complexities of it to the experts. Instead, I focus on one of the explanations behind the differences on what weblogs actually are and what is presented in the media, namely the tendency of human beings (when not writing scientific texts :) to generalise from their own experiences. For example, I can easily imagine how a business/technology analysts would write about blogging having in mind examples of bloggers he knows in the industry without realising that there is a whole different world just next door. Same is likely to be true for bloggers themselves :

Bloggers [...] are presumably not intending to exclude women and youth from the definition of blogging. Rather, they are defining the weblog based on their own activities and those of the people they know, and extrapolating back in time to the antecedents of those activities.

I have admit, I went through that myself, although to a lesser degree. Before another paper by Susan Herring and others came to my attention I didn’t fully realise that the blogs that I wanted to study (those of knowledge workers and connected with work to a degree) were a tiny minority in the blogosphere. At that time I became much more careful about positioning and generalising the results of my own research.

I also experienced the issue from another side, realising that others might have their own vision on what weblogs are that exclude blogging as I know it. A reviewer of the paper on blogging conversations commented on our findings suggesting that they were “so unlike the blogging that everyone else has written about that I’m not sure where the authors are coming from”. Since then it became even more important for me to put blogging as I know it on the map, even if it looks pretty different from what research of other types of weblogs says.

Finally, another example, to move the discussion a bit out of the research domain. While doing interviews in Microsoft I realised that the same “generalising from own experiences” trend came out there. Public image of blogging in the company is pretty much about external customer-oriented weblogs and the value of those (reflected to a degree in Naked conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel). During the interviews with people responsible for supporting or promoting weblogs in the company the discussion was often focused mainly on those types of weblogs, once taken to the extreme with a statement that “there is not clear business purpose for [internal weblogs]“.

However, our interviews with more bloggers in the company suggest that while external weblogs are definitely in the majority and while customer-related benefits are probably most relevant business-wise, other types of weblogs do exist and weblogs could be useful in a variety of ways next to those well advocated publicly. Some of it is in the paper with the study results, but I guess I could do more work to articulate those “non-mainstream” uses more explicitly.

So, given all these, my own approach would be more like this:

• don’t believe anyone as they may generalise from their own experiences;
• be especially careful with those in power (given by media, published research* or business authority) since their generalisations could be amplified enough to hide the diversity of what is actually happening.

*Ideally, this shouldn’t be the case in research, but, although theoretically researchers should make grounded claims, there are all sorts of biases coming from theories, methodologies and methods used, as well as a space for an error and personal beliefs.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/12/02.html#a1866; comments are here.

• BlogWalk: artefacts and invisible audience
• Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging

While reading a research report for the study where I was one of the respondents I realised that even while my quotes were identified with a nickname there would be quite some number of people who could figure out it was me if they get to read the whole thing…

This is something I has been struggling in my own research as well. Simple: when I report on interviews with bloggers shall I add a (nick)name to every quote/fact?

On one hand, it dramatically improves readability of the research results – readers could reconstruct what different characters were saying and how different aspects of their story connect to each other. On another hand, this is exactly something that compromises their privacy: sometimes you don’t need a name to recognise that the story told in the research report is associated with a specific person.

Sometimes you don’t need the whole story. In one of my interviews with Microsoft bloggers I brought in an opposing opinion of another respondent (“some people say so and so”) to get into a discussion on why differences were there. The respondent immediately identified the name of the person I tried to hide…

This could be just an exception, but I’m pretty sure that if I let quotes to be accompanied by nicknames (=allowing to trace that they belong to the same person) then many of the personalities behind them could be easily identified by their peers (and I’m not talking about the fact that I can’t quote anything from the respondents’ blogs – that gives them away immediately).

It doesn’t make a big issue when “the field” you study and “the academic audience” you write for are far apart, so the chances of someone from the field reading the results of the study is low. However, it’s not the case with my research – a weblog reveals personality and the blogosphere is interconnected enough, I choose to study lead users who often have an interest in the results and I actually find important reaching them – the chances that my respondents or people who can identify them read the results are pretty high.

And, while I’m strfuggling with my writing choices I have a book suggestion for those who feel like diving into these issues further: When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. So far this was the best to put my own experiences and thinking into perspective. I will blog it one day (if I’m bad this will not happen before writing the related section of my dissertation :)

Related from another angle: Weblog research ethics – 1, 2 3

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/11.html#a1799; comments are here.

• Methodology chapter: posting parts online
• Bloggers cited in my dissertation
• Just an observation

My last post made me thinking on (actually drawing :) the distinctions between artefacts and practices in a context of weblog research (not theorethical at all):

• Blogging artefacts are “things” that could be seen: weblog posts, links, comments, blogrolls, RSS subscriptions, etc. Some of them are hidden (e.g. draft posts), but most could be easily observed online. That make studying weblogs fun (if you don’t bump into teasing data).
• Blogging practices is about what bloggers do with their blogs, as well as why and how of it. Blogging practices are often invisible and (sub)culture-specific. Artefacts represent practices and play all other roles (e.g. they could be products or tools).

So, what would be a way to study blogging practices? I have a few pictures. The first two represent what I call archeology and ethnography (the person with “flower” is actually a researcher with “looking glass” :).

‘Archeology’ is about studying artefacts in order to say something about artefacts or practices. In the first case, I don’t have any problem: study artefacts -> say something about them.

The second case could be more complicated. Artefacts only represent practices, so if you want to study artefacts and then say something about practices you need to understand how those two connected. One way to do so is by having a good theory (existing knowledge of connections between artefacts and practices): if you have it then claims about practices based on artefacts could be pretty much true.

The point is that in most cases we do not have good existing knowledge about blogging practices, so I tend to be quite critical on blog research that concludes something about blogging practices by studying only artefacts. For example.

Ethnography would be an alternative: studying practices by living the “life of the tribe”. In this case you are more likely to provide a better picture of specific practices, but those would be limited to subcultures you studied. However, it’s also pretty time-consuming.

I also learnt from Andrea that ethnographers do not necessarily have interest in artefacts or skills to study them the way “archeologists” would do. Which would be a pity in a case of weblogs, since blogging artefacts can say a lot, especially if “triangulated” based on knowledge about practices.

It also doesn’t mean that you really have to be “inside” to learn about practices. Another way would be to ask people to tell stories about practices (e.g. in interviews or, in a very shortened form, in surveys). However, blogs provide an additional way: one can study meta-blogging (blog posts reflecting on all kinds of issues around blogging).

Meta-blogging posts would provide at least some idea on blogging practices without directly asking bloggers. Of course, they are likely to bias the results in the direction of bloggers who tend to reflect more or do not censor these posts based on whatever reason.

***

Hmm… not that scientific, but at least something. In case you wonder where are my own preferences: they are about triangulating :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/12.html#a1763; comments are here.

• Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds
• Archaeology and ethnography in weblog research
• KM bloggers community

Since I turned back to my study of weblogs at Microsoft and started to work on further analysis/writing it up, I’m constantly struggling to find a way to present the results that somehow refers to a typology of weblogs. All my attempts so far bring me to multiple categories – overlapping, orthogonal, incomplete…

Much like those of widely quoted classification on animals fom Jorge Luis Borges:

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

I’m writing about the selection of people for interviews for that study and I can’t avoid thinking of the parallels. Since the exploratory nature of the study we wanted to talk to people representing a diversity – of the types of weblogs they wrote, their attitudes to blogging, their position in organisation… Somewhere after first few interviews I made a list titled “find those bloggers” that was supposed to help adding diversity to the data we already had (insights from relatively high-profile bloggers from technology-related groups). It’s pretty much like those animals of Borges:

• internal bloggers
• team bloggers
• bloggers blogging in other countries/languages
• bloggers from marketing, research, interns or contractors
• low-profile bloggers (both internal and external)
• those who stopped
• MSN spaces hosted bloggers
• those successfully blogging at both team and individual blog
• “ghost” bloggers (those contributing content to their manager’s blog)
• blog readers

Of course, the challenge was to find all those :) Given unsystematic categories, the sampling was unsystematic as well:

• I asked for recommendations during interviews, but also also looked for possible leads or introductions during any social encounters while being there
• I spent a lot of time at all places with identyfiable weblogs by Microsoft employees, looking at deviations from what we already had (e.g. browsing recently updated weblogs to see those with unusual content or clearly belonging to a group or written on another language)
• I tried to match the data I could get on bloggers to internal contact information to figure out those located in other countries or working in groups different from what we already had (this included sampling by location)
• I ended up doing interview with a blogger who criticised me for not talking to a representative group when we announced an internal talk on the study results

Although I’m pretty sure of getting difficult methodological questions whenever the result are presented, I’m happy of doing it this way – giving space to emergent categories even if they don’t fit a typology – they brought interesting insights.

Of course, now I’m struggling of presenting all that in a structured way with at least some logic behind :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/17.html#a1740; comments are here.

• On attributing interviews done for my research: the dark side of transparency
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography
• Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?

12/34. 12 hours by train in 34 hours – some sleep, first gluntwine this year and lots of talking in between :)

Somewhere between Frankfurt am Main and Köln I detach myself from the book I’m reading and look around. Upper shelves are packed with black cabin-size suitcases; seats under then are packed with dark suited businessman. They look strange – not reading, not sleeping, not clicking around through emails – just sitting and staring into nowhere. I wonder if they are jetlagged or just spend the day negotiating big deals…

I go back to my book. It’s a collection of interviews with travel writers, A sense of place, by Michael Chapiro. I picked it up in January, when we traded beaches of Waikiki for coolness and coffee of Barnes&Noble. It was patiently waiting for me – till last week. Since then I was steeling a bit of time here and there to dive into it. Fortunately this trip is long enough to let me do all of that – watching people, reviewing reports, sending kusjes and being able to savour the book slowly as food in a good restaurant.

I enjoy this book – the themes – home and being far away, crossing borders and cultures, writing, being insider and outsider, facts and fiction. And the style – close and somewhat intimate conversations, asking very knowing questions coming from reading travel narratives that may be reveal more about their authors than about destinations.

As usual I start seeing parallels with my own work. Thinking of absorbing details of others’ lives from their weblogs, sense of connectedness and somewhat intimate knowledge about them – and interviews that could touch themes and go to the depths not possible otherwise.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/11/17.html#a1707; comments are here.

• Uncovering the implicit
• Large social network imposes an higher attention degree on what goes on worldwide
• Aggregation can kill personal voices

Wendy Freeman comments on my post on the role of theory:

I think that in this sense theory distances people from the way that others view a particular event or book or technology or …. Viewing everyday practice through a particular theoretical lens is exciting because it gives depth to what we see, but trying to communicate that to others is a challenge. We lack a common language. Is this another social dimension to learning? Developing a shared way of looking at something? Of course, it’s called different things, shared beliefs, shared understanding, shared language, or shared theoretical frameworks.

Right on the point. Going further into theoretical explanations gives depth to the phenomenon you study, but it also deepens the gap between you as a researcher and others (people in general, people you study, other researchers who happen to go deep into other theories).

It is also about choices to whom you are accountable as a researcher. You have to satisfy your research community, taking care of theories, rigor and transparency. But going to far into that has risks of disconnecting with the reality and doing research just for the sake of intellectual curiosity.

For me research is about impact. Of course, intellectual curiosity, contribution to a theory and rigor should be there, but for me my own research makes sense only if it makes a difference in the lives of people. People who may or may not understand the language of theory.

Researchers make their own choices about that. Some would choose hunting for treasures deep in the theory land and let others bring it back to the world just because this enables them to go further. Others would take extra effort not to bring it back (at all or during the study time), out of ethical concerns (do you have a right to change the way indigenous people live with all your ideas on how things could be different?) or methodological consideration (keeping distance helps to avoid “polluting your data”*). I guess I belong to another group, those who feel that bringing it back is part of the research itself.

I’m not the first one to bring it up (and the researcher in me says that I should dig out references to “earlier work” :). It’s only now I’m starting to articulate** my implicit beliefs in researcher’s accountability to the broader community than his or her research peers, the responsibility to bring the research results back from the theory land to where most people live, either by translating them into everyday words, teaching the language of theory or even involving them as co-researchers…

*Although the concern is reasonable, I hate this expression.

** Heavily influenced by conversations at AOIR, especially those with Terri Senft, Annette Markham, Abby Goodrum and kat jungnickel.

Tags: aoir, aoir6

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/10/19.html#a1699; comments are here.

• Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds
• Blogging and paper writing
• On things that hide behind typical formats of reporting research

Quite often in my PhD process I have complicated discussions about the role of theory in my research. Today, looking through my Flickr photos I realised that one of them could serve as a good example.

A year ago I probably wouldn’t notice it or wouldn’t make a photo – it’s just a city scene during a lunch break. So, what happened between now and then?

I read some theory :)

Being driven by my personal interests in architecture and fascination with cities as well as sensing emergent parallels between city life and social processes in online spaces, I went through reading “Life between buildings” by Jan Gehl and City: Rediscovering the Center by William H. White (see Edges and Individual in a public space: learning from weblogs and cities for some background).

Those two books are full with observations of people sitting on the curb and discussions on why, how and where it happens as well as implications for the design of public places in cities.

Now, equipped with knowledge I took from those books I look at things differently, I notice things that I wouldn’t notice before and I know what questions to ask…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/10/12.html#a1692; comments are here.

• DIRN workshop
• BlogWalk Seattle: people
• Lost with PhD ideas

“Connecting the dots” is the biggest fun I have doing my study of weblogs at Microsoft… As an outsider I have the excuse of asking stupid questions and the value of insights coming from getting enculturated into local practices. As an insider (signed NDAs :) I have certain degree of trust and access to the information I wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise. As a blogger I pay attention to the details. As a researcher I have time to go around and ask questions and I have an inclination to look how details fit into a bigger picture.

With fun comes the responsibility.

Sometimes I realise that having access to all bits and pieces, blog initiatives through the company and experiences of different people as well as time to study those I may discover things that nobody knows yet (at the end, this is what research is about :). I see how things happening in the different parts of the company are connected. I see people who may be much better knowing about each other. I hear about the events from the different sides. All that knowledge can be useful if it turns into action.

And this is where the hard choices came into play again. Before coming to Microsoft I thought that my usual researcher vs. blogger problem wouldn’t appear in this case. Since I’m not studying my own community I thought I could stay distant as an observer. It doesn’t work.

The first reason is that as an intern I’m part of the company, at least for the time being. So, I feel responsible for doing some good while I’m here.

I’m also a blogger. It makes talking to other bloggers easier, but often it pushes me out of the “just observing” end because I have my own how do I blog over here? burning questions next to the pure research interests.

Finally it’s personality. I can’t walk away silently knowing that I know something that could help people trying to solve a particular problem. Even if it means being a better researcher.

So, I’m not a true observer – I contribute and often my contributions are results from having advantage of “connecting the dots” as a researcher. Once in a while I introduce people, suggest solutions or provide information that wouldn’t be there without me. I also leak things that I probably shouldn’t…

All these make me more of a participant than observer and probably change things I’m studying. Bad on methodology side.

But the same things open new doors, turn into trusted relations or give life to unexpected developments that help understanding blogging at Microsoft much better.

You win some, you lose some…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/08/20.html#a1639; comments are here.

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