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)

• The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think
• Methodology chapter: Quality verification strategies
• Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds

Last week I’ve got a comment on the draft chapter that got me stuck. In the study I describe my uses of weblog to develop dissertation ideas using meta-blogging posts from my weblog. As a result the section tells how this happens and from the comment it became clear that I also have to show it. Which is pretty tricky.

How do you show how ideas grow? I think as a reader of a weblog you just see them unfolding and connecting over time and, if you see a product that comes out as a result, you can often pinpoint traces of those early ideas and emerging connections. But how do you show it to someone who doesn’t have that experience, ideally in a condensed, easy to digest way?

Given what I know about visualising blog (and other) data I can think of nice visualisations of terms, tags and links over time, but I also know how much effort creating those visualisations requires.

I tried an easy route – looking at WordPress plugins that could show anything over time based on my weblog archives. Interestingly, while there are many of them to track external statistics (visits, referrals, most popular posts, etc.), there are hardly any to do it for the weblog itself. GeneralStats, that “counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages”, is one exception I found, but even it does not show, for example, numbers of weblog posts per category per month.

All of this is a bit sad. Not that much because it gives me a headache thinking about editing the chapter, but mainly as lack of tools to see patterns in one’s own weblog shows lack of demand for it…

• K-Collector is launched
• Weblog audience: how to you find your own?
• Writing: three words

About a year ago I looked for Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers) – I wanted to find a relatively objective way to judge how much of my weblog writing ends up in the dissertation.

Between other things I experimented with generating and comparing tagclouds from texts that were supposed to correspond to each other. I tried several tools, but ended up with tagCrowd since it allowed using generic and custom-made lists of stop words.

As an experiment I used text of five dissertation chapters (draft versions as of April 17, 2008) and the text of blog posts coded as corresponding to those chapters to generate a visualisation of most frequent words in each case. After removing stop words (general English plus those from my own list that I was stupid enough not to save) 65 most frequent words are visualised.

For example, two tagclouds below are those from the blogposts related to the Microsoft study and the draft chapter with the results of it.

In total I had 5 pairs of visualisations. I then mixed them and asked five people familiar with my research (supervisors and collaborators) and eight students (taking a class with Anjo) to find matching pairs. The results are below.

Some comments:

• I guess there is a connection between PhD chapters and blogposts :)
• The high score for the methodology chapter is explained by its qualitative difference from the rest of the dissertation.
• The low score for this chapter is explained by the fact that the coding of weblog entries in relation to chapters was done prior to writing it. As a results it included many “might be relevant” posts, while for other chapters the focus was more clear. In addition, the draft version of the chapter used to generate the visualisation was the first draft, while in other cases those were revised several times.

It was nice to see that although many of the visualisations looked similar (with blogging and weblog being big ;) it was actually possible to match the pairs. But the nicest thing was simply making all those pictures, laying them on the floor and thinking that I actually had some version of 5 chapters out of the 7 :)

• Blogging as thinking in short paragraphs
• Time to reflect: my uses of weblog
• Once more on blogging and writing

[This post was in drafts while I was moving weblogs]

Here comes another turn on my researcher vs. blogger dilemma. I’m working on a study that aims to describe how my own blogging practices contributed to the development of ideas for my dissertation (I’m extremely happy to be able to do exactly what I envisioned long time ago) and I use my weblog as a data source to do so. A quote from my current draft:

As a starting point for reconstructing blogging practices I use my weblog artefacts (weblog entries, link, tags, etc.). In particular, I look at the content of meta-blogging entries and at the patterns of weblog uses.

Meta-blogging entries provide an unstructured documentation of my experiences of using the weblog to develop ideas. I use this in-situ view of my blogging practices as a starting point for the analysis and restructuring aimed to produce a systematic description of them. For an additional insight and an illustration of practices I look at patterns of weblog uses, especially focusing on categorisation of ideas, their development over time and their transformation that resulted in this dissertation.

To support the analysis of weblog entries as well as the access to them for the readers of this work, they are categorised using emergent and retrospective codes. Emergent codes are tags that I used for topical organisation of my weblog entries when I wrote them. Retrospective codes are added for specific purposes at the moment of doing this study (March-April 2008); those include references to the specific chapters of the dissertation and marking all meta-blogging entries as such. All coding is done using the functionality of my weblog software, so the pages that aggregate the results on specific codes are visible in public and could be used as a reference throughout the dissertation.

So, now the practical problem. As a researcher I want the codes to be “frozen” at the moment of doing the study, as a blogger I want to be able to edit and change them, since the “codes” are tags and categories that provide views on my weblog. The good thing is that I’m doing the study at the moment of moving from Radio to WordPress, so I can just “freeze” Radio archives as they are. The bad thing is that I can’t update Radio public pages anymore, so they include only emergent codes (liveTopics tags that I used so far), while it could make sense to see them together with the retrospective codes I added specifically for this study (categories “Chapter 1-7″ and “Meta-blogging”).

My way out:

• Researcher’s hat on:
  • I use the archived version of Radio weblog as a snapshot of what was before the analysis. All posts are there with corresponding emergent codes – liveTopics tags (they are called “topics” – confusing, is not it?). The index of those tags is at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/allTopics.html
• Blogger’s hat on:
  • I use the WordPress version of the weblog as a living blog, which means editing categories and tags in a way that makes sense for me as a blogger.
• Researcher’s hat on:
  • For those other researchers who might want to have all codes frozen in one place I’ll put an RSS archive of my weblog with all codes used for this study online. It’s not going to be easy to access via browser, but at least it will be somewhere in public.

As my new weblog should provide an easier way for browsing I use links to it as a reference in the dissertation, while making sure that all posts that have an “archived” Radio version are linked from their new copies.

• Methodology chapter: Participation
• Radio Userland: what I love and hate about it
• Weblog research: artefacts and practices

I’m almost finished with my methodology chapter. I haven’t been blogging much while writing it, but it contains quite a few things where I either would be extremely happy with the feedback or I believe that some other “methodologically challenged” researcher could benefit from (without waiting for the whole dissertation to be published).

So, I’m going to post those pieces online and link them from this post. You can also email me if you really want to read the whole methodology chapter before I incorporate the feedback from my supervisors :)

Chapter parts*

• Blogging practices
• Participation
• Quality criteria
• Quality verification strategies
• Matching quality criteria and verification strategies

*They are parts of the bigger whole, even if I tried to make them relatively readable in a stand-alone mode. These are also drafts…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/09/27.html#a1945; comments are here.

• Research methodology: everything is relative
• On personal preferences that shape research
• Soul searching

One of the practical problem when writing scientific texts about weblogs is dealing with citations. Apart from ethical issues (e.g. blog research ethics, respondent identification) there is a practical problem of combining references to “traditional” publication sources with references to weblog entries.

In my case weblog entries are also referred to in two ways – (1) as a reference to attribute an idea or support an argument and (2) as a data source used for an illustration – and it could make sense to distinguish between those two. There are also references to my own weblog, which serves an additional role of research diary.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for my dissertation, but I’m collecting some inspirational ideas.

Vivian Serfaty in The Mirror and the Veil provides references to weblog posts quoted in the footnotes. Bibliography section is split in a several categories: works cited, diaries cited, archives and webrings, political blogs cites, miscellaneouss.

In Uses of blogs references, weblog links and notes are included in endnotes for each chapter. There is also a bibliography at the end that includes “key sources” (mainly published articles and books, but also a few online essays; weblog entries are not included).

The reflexive thesis by Malcolm Ashmore provides another example. It’s not about weblogs, but a good example of referencing all kinds of sources for his dissertation (published as a book in this case). Below is truncated version of TOC:

• Foreword, abstract, etc.
• Introduction
• Chapters 1-7
• Appendix. Nonbibliographical sources and other secrets

• Interviews
• Correspondence
• Referees’ reports
• Research proposals
• Early drafts
• Conferences: discourse and relexivity workshops
• Telephone conversations
• Sources of some of “my” textual techniques
• Other secrets

Any other suggestions?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/07.html#a1903; comments are here.

• Blogging and paper writing
• PhD process
• RSS vs. browser for weblog reading

As you could imagine, given my research I can’t avoid doing it. A couple of years ago life was easy: you could always say “hardly anything has been published” and get away with it. Now things are more complicated, there is a lot of stuff all over the place

So, some of the challenges I’m struggling with:

Separating stories about what and how actually works from how things might or should be done. At this moment coming up with all kinds of normative or speculative ideas about business uses of weblogs is not a problem. The problem is that there are only a few studies of what actually happens in practice.

Figuring out how far you can (scientifically) trust a certain story based on explicit indications on what data has been collected and why.

Deciding how far I should go “out of the scientific” in selecting what to cite. Academic publications on business blogs are scarce, while there are quite a lot of white papers, case-studies from commercial companies, business publications or general media stories on the topic. And, of course, there are lots of ideas worth citing across the blogosphere.

The last one is a difficult decision. For an academic getting into research on business blogging it wouldn’t be an issue: just run search through databases of scientific publications, work with the results and pretend that the rest doesn’t exist. For me, learning about interesting issues in the field from weblogs years before something along the same lines gets “properly” published, it is a challenge. I can not pretend that the body of knowledge in weblogs doesn’t exist, but, bounded by academic conventions, I can’t figure a good way to fit it into my publications.

Even more, even if I try to give an overview of what is there on the topic across weblogs, I can’t do it according to academic standards that aim for completeness and objectivity. I know that I shouldn’t even try to provide a complete and objective picture when giving an overview on post on whatever issue across weblogs.

Why it’s so incredibly easier and more rewarding to write a blog post than a piece of scientific text? Why can’t I have best of both worlds: grounded claims of academic publications and the style of a blog post?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/30.html#a1863; comments are here.

• Defining personal KM
• Changing blogging platform
• In Full Flow: my PhD and more stories about passion at work

A few days ago Riccardo asked:

We all know of cases where an employee has been fired because of her blog… but does anybody know of managers being fired or the hierarchy of an enterprise affected by a negative “peer review” through the comments of an internal blog?

I’m not that sure about the internal blogs, but I have some examples (here) of how external blogs influence the hierarchy inside. For example, one of the stories I’ve heard during my Microsoft study was from a blogger who was in a conflicting situation with his more experienced colleagues about features of a product, but managed to convince them by showing a discussion on the issue with external readers of his weblog.

Last few days I was thinking a lot about it – thinking about parallels with my own work. Given how our company works (with multiple hierarchies in projects that could make you a manager and a lowest-ranking team member of the same person at the same time) it’s not a big issue.

However, in doing PhD research it is – the hierarchy is not only well defined, but also embedded into the practices of academic work. For example, many PhDs I know get their own professional network via introductions by their professors. When you are beginner in the field, it’s very natural to get to know it (people, themes, events, politics, etc.) via someone more experienced and well established, and your supervisor is a very natural figure for that role.

Blogging changes that – it gives you an alternative way to connect to the professional world. In my case it has all kinds of effects, but right now I’m trying to figure out how to deal with one in particular – deciding what to do when my supervisors and external people in my blogging world have pretty different perspectives on part of my work…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/26.html#a1861; comments are here.

• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: affiliation and attribution
• Corporate guidelines for personal weblogs
• CFP: Organisational Blogs: Opportunities and Challenges

Another turn on ‘E-mail is where knowledge goes to die’ and that blogs could solve the problem, but it’s not easy to ‘sell’ to managers (Andy, thanks for the pointer). And a very good comment by Tony Karrer:

I’ve seen a few other places that advocate this, BUT, how do you address the fact that email is relatively more of a push technology. In other words, in today’s corporate world, someone is more likely to read an email than an update to a web page.

Given my own blogging experiences I believe that this issue has to be taken seriously. There are a couple of reasons for that:

First, email serves many functions. Next to being a tool for communication, it could work reminder for to-dos, organiser of work and even turn into habitat at work (for those who want more – look at email management research and studies that touch email as part of personal information management research).

Suggesting that (part of) email communication should be replaced by blogging without taking into account those functions is likely to break existing personal information management practices of people. This could result in decreased personal productivity next to increased organisational productivity with questionable net gain.

Second, before we discuss increased organisational productivity as a result of (part of) personal email archives available on intranet we need to make sure that those bits will actually be found and used by others. And this is not that easy…

With email you have to deal with mainly with your own inbox. It’s already much of an email overload, since next to those really important ‘to do’ emails you are likely to have ‘FYI’ emails on things that might be interesting, ‘corporate spam’ (saw the term recently, don’t remember where) that you may not need at all, but someone in a company thinks that you need, personal emails and lots of other things. Or, using distinctions in my previous post, it includes things that don’t fit that are often difficult to process.

Now just imagine that next to your own mailbox you have access to mailboxes of others. The amount of things that don’t fit increases dramatically. The good side of it that it’s a source of unexpected insights, it’s searchable, it’s archived company-wide forever. The bad thing is that we are not equipped to deal with it.

Now to my personal example. When I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

So, I’d suggest that before evangelising blogs as an alternative to email we should figure out how people in a company are going to process increased amounts of available and potentially useful information when it comes out from hidden email archives. Otherwise we risk of moving a big chunk of information from email that at least read to a company-wide intranet that many people learnt to ignore (unless that important document is announced by an email from CEO).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/24.html#a1805; comments are here.

• Researcher vs. blogger: My weblog as a data source
• Things that don’t fit
• Research papers on business blogging

Some time back I wrote about knowledge which is not part of existing workflows. Now I’m struggling with finding more fine-grained distinctions.

First, a few of related categories:

• Stephen Covey‘s classification of tasks into an urgent/important matrix: important things do not have to be time-sensitive in a short-term (=it’s important to do something about one’s professional development, but it’s not necessary to work on it today).
• Hot / warm / cold information in personal information management studies (I remember seeing it in Documents at Hand: Learning from Paper to Improve Digital Technologies, but can’t check right now if the authors referred to another source regarding it). It indicates the degree of need for a piece of information (e.g. document) in relation to a task performed right now.
• Filing and piling strategies (e.g. here) in respect to organising/archiving pieces of information, where piling often means “I may want to access it later, but don’t know where exactly I should put it”.

Now, the dimensions regarding knowledge/information that I consider important:

• Relevancy: it’s relevant – I don’t know – irrelevant
• Time-sensitivity: I need it now – as soon as possible – when I do so and so – one day soon – one day
• Ability to categorise: it’s belongs to a task/project – theme – “I feel it’s important, but I don’t know where it belongs”

Hmm, I thought that by writing it down things will become more clear, but it doesn’t work that way :))). Another try, now in a matrix:

*This comes from a frequent expression of my husband, who would often suggest to buy “I don’t know juice” or to eat in “I don’t know restaurant” when I’m sure that I want something, but not sure what and how…

The reason I want to bring it in is simple:

• it’s things that don’t fit that make knowledge work so complicated and so full of unexpected discoveries
• we often don’t have good tools to deal with things that don’t fit, either because those require definite judgement on how far those are relevant and/or ability to process them in a useful way

Examples of things that do not fit:

• coffee-table rumour from a colleague about management decision that affects the project I work in
• an article which is interesting, but I don’t have a place to cite it right now
• all those enterprise 2.0 blog posts that pop-up in my RSS reader
• an article about new English language standards for the pilots of international flights that gives examples of plane incidents that happened due to lack of shared understanding

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/24.html#a1804; comments are here.

• Age of transparency: live your life well aware that everything counts
• Edublog Awards: results
• Weblog research ethics (3)