Mathemagenic » citedCh5 http://blog.mathemagenic.com Lilia Efimova on personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance... Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:25:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Bloggers cited in the dissertation http://blog.mathemagenic.com/phd/bloggers-cited/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/phd/bloggers-cited/#comments Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:27:32 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?page_id=1958

[There are still few things I might fix on this page]

This pages includes references to the people weblogs of whom I cite or discuss in some way in my dissertation. It is here for two purposes. First, as an easy way to jump from the printed dissertation text to the specific weblogs that appear there. Second, as a way to notify bloggers that quotes from their blogs (or links to them) appear in the dissertation text (a version of this page also appears as a blog post to make trackbacks and indexing work better).

If you are the blogger listed here you might want to know that:

  • I treat weblogs as a publicly available texts and do not ask permissions for citing them. The reasons for this and other choices in respect to referring to bloggers in my dissertation are discussed in the research ethics section of it.
  • If you have a concern about your weblog being cited, I’m happy to share the text where it appears and remove the citation if you have a reason for doing so. This could only be done until the dissertation text is finalised (somewhere end of April-mid May 2009), so if you have a concern it’s the time to act.

My own weblog

Since many of my own weblog posts appear in the dissertation, I do not provide an extensive list here. All references to my weblog are accompanied by the title and the date, which could be used to retrieve them:

  • by title: use the search field
  • by date: go to blog.mathemagenic.com/year/month/day/ (e.g. blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/06/21/ for 21 June 2002); scroll if there are multiple posts on the page to find the right one

Alternatively, you can also browse cited blog posts per chapter: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

Weblogs of others

Bloggers are listed in the alphabetical order according to their surnames (blog titles if I couldn’t figure out the name); next to the names I include blogs that (I think) identifies the blogger best at the moment of making this list (March 2009). Titles of the specific posts cited are linked to the pages where I originally found them or, if those were moved, where they could be accessed in March 2009. The list excludes bloggers cited anonymously and those, who’s academic work is cited without discussing their weblogs.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/phd/bloggers-cited/feed/ 0 Blog networking study: an overview http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/11/20/blog-networking-study/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/11/20/blog-networking-study/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:48:43 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1661

As part of my PhD research I studied (blog) networking practices of KM bloggers (~those who write on KM-related topics). Turning the results into an academic text would take a while, so I think it make a lot of sense to share draft results online. This post is here to provide an overview of what is coming, I’ll add links and probably edit it over time.

[If you don't feel like reading everything you should probably wait for the summary of the results and parts of the discussion (should take a couple of weeks). If you want a more polished scientific version you'll have to wait for the dissertation to be finished (hopefully somewhere early spring). A publication is likely to take even longer.]

Update: most of it is now in the Chapter 5. of my dissertation. I’m not 100% happy with it and hoping to rework it into a paper.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/11/20/blog-networking-study/feed/ 1 Blog networking study: interviews http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/11/20/blog-networking-study-interviews/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/11/20/blog-networking-study-interviews/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:25:49 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1757

In summer I did interviews with several bloggers writing on “around knowledge management” topics about their practices of networking via weblogs. It took a while to work out summaries for those interviews (mainly due to all kinds of research issues), but now I’m happy to share them online. A bit of the “methodological” details are at the end of this post; the results of the study are coming up as a series of blog posts.

Interview summaries:

When selecting bloggers for interviews I aimed to represent a variety of blogging and networking experiences. Bloggers were selected by what I call a “diversity snowball” approach. Since I wasn’t following KM blogophere as actively as before I first talked discussed a list of KM bloggers that might be interesting to interview with Jack Vinson and then proceeded by asking the interviewees to suggest other bloggers they thought were different from themselves. I contacted more people for the interviews, but had to stop somewhere due to the logistics around summer holidays and looming PhD deadlines. I’d love to be able to hear from more bloggers about their own practices – hopefully sharing the results of this study online helps to have a public conversation on those.

When asking bloggers to participate I indicated my intentions of publishing summaries of the interviews and draft results online, as well as using their real names and links to their weblogs in the reports. Semi-structured interviews covered the following themes:

  • professional background of a participant and characteristics of her network in KM field prior to blogging
  • changes in the network or networking practices because of blogging
  • uses of weblogs for developing, maintaining and activating relations as a starting point for articulating stages of the process at more granular level
  • place of the weblog in the ecosystem of networking tools (mainly focusing on what weblogs are good for and when they do not work).
  • important networking-related issues that haven’t been discussed

I did all interviews via Skype, recorded them and made notes. I then used anonymised summaries of the interviews to discuss emergent themes with two other researchers (colleagues who are aware of my work, but not blogging themselves or doing research on blogging). That discussion served as an input to start working on the study results and on revising summaries to make sure they included important information. Revised summaries were sent to the participants, edited to address their comments and then published online.

An overview of the study as a whole and links to the results are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/11/20/blog-networking-study-interviews/feed/ 5 Meeting imaginary friend http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/23/meeting-imaginary-friend/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/23/meeting-imaginary-friend/#comments Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:54:42 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/23.html#a1744

Somewhere in the morning he asks: “Have you actually met Andrea?”

“No.” And, feeling that I need an excuse, I add – “but I have stayed myself in the houses of bloggers I never met”. He smiles understandingly and I hope that he really understands, even if it looks a bit crazy…

Later during the day, in between work and cleaning the house, I think that indeed it’s a bit crazy – that sort of crazy that became a lifestyle for me. Somehow, relations with other bloggers need to cross the boundary between online and offline. Somehow, being in a weblog-mediated contact often turns into a need (often an urge ;) to meet – to move on slow mediated conversations into real life exchanges, to see how much real person is close to that imaginary friend you construct while reading a weblog, emailing and skyping in between, to confirm that you are indeed as close in the real life as it feels from online. And, blogging seems to create not only this need, but also the trust needed to cross the boundary with a bit intrusive “I’m in the city – shall we meet?” or “so, why don’t you come here?”, to go the extra mile of arranging the logistics and to sound convincing while explaining to others why you actually do those crazy things…

In the evening, when we meet for the first time, I feel strange. I know that feeling from before, meeting someone you feel you know quite good, while realizing that you probably don’t really know the person. The appearance, the physical presence is unfamiliar, so my brain resists accepting that I could actually know her, but then small details start kicking in – the voice that I know from Skype, personal things that I knew or that fit well with those I knew, references to old blogging themes… And while the conversation develops, my brain is getting more and more convinced – this is not a total stranger, we do click in so many ways, starting a conversation from the point where it was left last time, we probably do know quite a bit of each other and those – unblogged – details that come up now seem to fit that fuzzy picture constructed over time of reading what was in the blog and what was in between the lines…

Narcissi in the sunAnd, symbolically, first of this spring narcissi’s stand in the sunlit living room – reminding of those last year, the process of discovering my connections with ethnography that, beyond all other things, turned into connection with Andrea and brought her into my house…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/23.html#a1744; comments are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/23/meeting-imaginary-friend/feed/ 0 Communities, shared spaces and weblog reading http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/07/communities-shared-spaces-and-weblog-reading/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/07/communities-shared-spaces-and-weblog-reading/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:38:48 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/07.html#a1232

To start with – a piece from my comments to Blogs and CoPs: Can blogging replace communities of practice? (scroll to find)

For me (please forgive simplification) the essence of a community is in a sense of belonging and practices that its members share. I can understand that it’s hard to believe looking at loosely-coupled weblogs “out there” that their authors belong to a community, but I can not discard my own feeling of “belonging” as well as indications of many other bloggers saying that weblogs help to build relations and shared understanding and to engage into reflective conversations.

I’ve been thinking on it for a while and trying to articulate my ideas about community clue in case of weblogs to a few people in Nürnberg and Lisbon… One more attempt.

Elmine Wijnia talks about weblogs as communication hub (also here) to find others and connect with them. I think weblogs do a bit more – they provide shared thinking space. I know that it’s hard to believe that many individual weblogs, even linked, can provide a shared space, but it feels like that (and I tend to trust my feelings :)))

For me the closest metaphor is a city, a shared living space. Usually we don’t know many others in our neighbourhood, but we walk on the same streets every day, see the same familiar strangers, get wet under the same rain, miss the same bus… We have a lot of context to share and meeting each other abroad we will connect easily. Living in a same city creates a sense of belonging and a sense of community…

Weblogs do as well. Of course, not for everyone (as in a city, you may not feel it). I was thinking what creates such shared context in case of weblogs. I guess it’s weblog reading.

I’m thinking about my own weblog ecosystem. We don’t read same weblogs, but they are interconnected, so at the end we get exposed to similar names, events, ideas, books. For example, once you get into KM blogging, you will quickly learn about wikis, join Orkut or find out who Dave Pollard is. Our experiences of blogging are never the same, like experiences of living on different streets, but in some cases they overlap enough to create a feeling of sharing the same space.

I think that those “some cases” of overlapping weblog experiences have to do with several things: density of a network, speed of ideas travelling around and time that one devotes to reading weblogs of others. The last one is important: getting to know your community takes time and you will never connect with a city when you jump in and out of a tourist bus.

I’m getting more and more convinced that when introducing someone to blogging the most important thing is to help newcomer to start feeling rhythms of blogging cities: getting a map for an orientation, learning basic terms to find a way around, finding good guides (blogs to start reading), taking time to explore and soak…

I’m playing with a “city” metaphor to explain blogging… I’m thinking of RSS as public transport lines – they take you faster where you have to be, but you miss little secrets on a way. And about risks of generalising in weblog research when one studies only specific communities (think of aliens making their opinions about humans based on their study of New York ;)

I guess it’s time to dive a bit deeper into research on cities (thinking of Emergence on self-organisation of cities, William H. Whyte’s theory of triangulation, and may be even connecting with A city is not a tree).

So, may be at the end we can find out if and when weblogs can turn into a knowledge spaces…

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/07.html#a1232; comments are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/07/communities-shared-spaces-and-weblog-reading/feed/ 0 Weblog as a networking instrument http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/06/weblog-as-a-networking-instrument/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/06/weblog-as-a-networking-instrument/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2003 22:09:20 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/06.html#a859

Nardi, Whittaker & Schwarz article distinguish between three tasks in networking:

1. Building a network: Adding new nodes (people) to the network so that there are available resources when it is time to conduct joint work;

2. Maintaining the network, where a central task is keeping in touch with extant nodes;

3. Activating selected nodes at the time the work is to be done

It seems that weblogs are good for the first two and not good for the last one:

1. Reading weblogs helps to find like-minded people. You read someone, he links to someone else and this link serves as a personal recommendation. Then regular reading turns into linking and commenting, you get on the radar of this new person and after sometime you say “we know each other by reading blogs”.

2. Weblogs are particularly good for maintaining the network. With the power of RSS you know that you don’t have to remember to check what someone is doing/thinking. Weblogs really help to stay in touch.

3. It seems that weblogs are not really good for activating connection for a joint action: my experience shows that it’s usually done by e-mail (“I know you from reading your weblog and I wonder if you can help me with this”) or in some other ways. See recent post on weblogs weakness as action tool for more details.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/06.html#a859; comments are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/06/weblog-as-a-networking-instrument/feed/ 0 The power of loose ends (3) or the weakness of weblogs when it comes to joint actions http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/05/the-power-of-loose-ends-3-or-the-weakness-of-weblogs-when-it-comes-to-joint-actions/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/05/the-power-of-loose-ends-3-or-the-weakness-of-weblogs-when-it-comes-to-joint-actions/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2003 21:16:48 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/05.html#a858

To continue The power of visible loose ends (1) and (2).

Gary Lawrence Murphy, comments:

In most cases, the necessity comes first, and that’s when we will overcome all barriers to make it happen. When someone has a specific goal, especially a paid goal, others can clear their date-books and engage, and any frustrations of distance or bandwidth vanish proportional to the value of the collaboration [...].

But in all cases, we don’t create the team and then see what happens (Andy Warhol excepted) but we find the purpose and then staff a solution. It’s my observation that, by being the wide-sweep distant-early-warning radar, the skin of humanity, blogspace is spontaneously very good at identifying each itch, and from that point, coordinating the hands to scratch it is almost trivial.

Thus I don’t agree that we need to be “writing about future plans” as our starting point. What we need is an articulation of the goal state, the concrete world scenario that describes the itch scratched, what it would look like when done, and from that visioneering the scratching will begin. This is what happened with the blog-spam problem, the trackback problem, even the RSS vs Atom debate is all from bloggers having touched some problem, articulated the itch, and spread fragments of plans to scratch it until it gelled.

Ton Zijlstra, continues:

I think the writing about future plans, especially if they’re pretty concrete like Lilias possible conference calendar, can join up with coordinating the hand to scratch an earlier identified itch easily. Probably some or all of your plans are connected to identified itches, announcing them makes it possible to get other bloggers to go along for the ride.

And another, independent stream. Julian Elve, Actionable Knowledge (see comments as well, coming to “safe places in the middle” point):

After I’d let these posts mull around in my mind for a day or two, the first thought that came to me was this – just because I don’t neccessarily blog about actions I have taken as a result of blog-inspired knowledge creation, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t actionable knowledge created!

[...]But just because I blog carefully (or not at all) about those areas of my life does not mean that I don’t derive actionable knowledge from blogging that I can apply to those domains. The dilemma though is how to report that back? Some actions won’t make it through my blog-filters; others may be delayed or distorted; in either case there is a break in the learning cycle with my blog learning colleagues.

This is not about the trust I have in the people with whom I have blogosphere conversations, it is more about who else is eavesdropping. Is there any way to resolve this whilst still using an open channel? I’m not convinced there is – the contradiction we need to resolve is that a completely public channel will inevitably cause us to filter what we write, whilst part of the power of the blogosphere is the opportunity to discuss ideas with people from very different contexts.

I guess this conversation (and especially it’s hidden part) is a good example of tensions between “thinking together” and “doing together” as well as tensions between private and shared. To give you a feeling of the hidden part: some of the invisible activities related to this conversation (hope nobody gets angry about the disclosure):

So I guess it’s possible to get something actionable from our weblog connections, but weblogs are not the best instrument for it :)

I wonder why do we make choices for other tools as “actionable” spaces. Is it because their support for collaboration is better? Or – do we need more privacy than we can get in our weblogs? Or may be we just don’t know a good way to use weblogs to come up with joint actions?

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/05.html#a858; comments are here.

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