This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While blogging might provide a window onto practices of the blogger, on a surface weblog is just an artefact: text, links and bits of other media. In this post I reflect on the ways blogging helps to cross boundaries through information exchange and non-personal connections, using the concept of boundary object as a starting point. This concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), who used it to describe how practices of different social worlds are coordinated:

Boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393)

My original interest in using the concept of boundary objects in respect to blogging comes from the term itself (weblog is an object that works across various boundaries), so my treatment of it deviates from the way it is usually used. I use it to refer to an object at a boundary of different perspectives that include those of an individual, rather than to an object at an intersection between social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989) or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). In addition, boundary objects are defined through their use for coordinating different perspectives (for example, this point is emphasised by Wenger, 1998, pp. 107-108), while in the case of blogging coordination between perspectives is often an accidental side-effect, rather than intentional.

Those differences might warrant the need to introduce an alternative terminology, however I leave it for further work and focus on parallels between boundary objects and weblogs: artefacts-based connections between different perspectives that do not require personal engagement and characteristics that enable those connections.

Contrasting the role of boundary objects in crossing boundaries between communities of practice with brokering, Wenger emphasises that artefact-based connections “can transcend the spatiotemporal limitations inherent in participation” (Wenger, p. 110), since artefacts can travel easier than people, however, uprooted from specific practices, artefacts are also a source of ambiguity and misinterpretation. Studies, presented in my dissertation show that weblogs have a potential to connect different perspectives without requiring personal engagement. For example, readers of my weblog pick up bits of the research relevant for them; KM bloggers use weblogs to establish information relations next to those of more personal nature. The Microsoft case provides a view on how far information can travel via weblogs, as well as an idea of challenges of misinterpretation it can bring.

Based on the different types of boundary objects described by Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), Wenger proposes a number of characteristics “enabling artefacts to act as boundary objects” (Wenger, 2001, 107):

1) Modularity: each perspective can attend to one specific portion of the boundary object (e.g., a newspaper is a heterogeneous collection of articles that has something for each reader).

2) Abstraction: all perspectives are served at once by deletion of features that are specific for each perspective (e.g., a map abstracts from the terrain only certain features, such as distance and elevation).

3) Accommodation: the boundary object lends itself to various activities (e.g., the office building can accommodate the various practices of its tenants, its caretakers, its owners, and so forth).

4) Standardization: the information contained in a boundary object is in a prespecified form so that each constituency knows how to deal with it locally (for example, a questionnaire that specified how to provide some information by answering certain questions).

Those characteristics are useful to view what enables weblogs to serve as connectors across various perspectives.

Modularity and standardisation are inherent to weblogs: blogging is about bits of microcontent (weblog posts), connected within and across weblogs by standardised structure and protocols. When finding a new weblog, those familiar with the medium, know how to deal with it (e.g. distinguish specific posts and their metadata, browse through the archives or subscribe to the updates). Specific weblog posts, accompanied by permalinks, can be accessed without the rest of the weblog. This allows information presented in a weblog to travel far outside of the original contexts where it was created.

The potential of a weblog to accommodate various activities is not immediately obvious: on a surface it is an instrument for low-threshold publishing that allows reaching broad audiences without pushing information to them. However, the results of the studies presented in my dissertation suggest that it may also support conversations with self and interactions with specific others (more on publishing vs. interaction, conversations with self and conversations with others).

A combination of those three modes supports accommodation for various practices of different constituencies. An individual blogger might use weblog for a conversation with self – articulating thoughts and feelings, organising own digital bits or reflecting on the traces left over time in retrospect. Publishing makes one’s weblog traces exposed, so others can learn from them without necessarily engaging directly with the blogger. On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for interaction and engaging in-depth, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts.

Finally, since multiple perspectives are served at once, weblogs also exhibit a degree of abstraction, for example, when specific details of one’s work or personal situation is omitted to make possible sharing the essence in public and knowing that the author himself or those “who know” can read between the lines to reconstruct missing details. Abstraction also makes information presented in a weblog accessible and relevant to broader and varied audiences, while also increasing a chance for misinterpretation.

In sum, while not necessarily fully fitting in a definition of a boundary objects, weblogs exhibit characteristics that make them effective in establishing artefact-based connections across boundaries of different social world.

• Writer’s block :)
• Personal ways of doing things in public
• Finding confidence

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While to an extend weblogs do represent bloggers behind them and are often perceived as their online identities, studies presented in my dissertation also indicate that blogging involves many challenges of dealing with different audiences that a weblog serves (the results of blog networking study provide examples of both). Blogging in a context of knowledge work requires balancing interests of self and others, peers and customers, close friends and occasional lurkers, or those of people coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. From this perspective I find useful the discussion of identity in relation to participation in different communities of practice by Etienne Wenger (1998, p.159):

Our various forms of participation delineate pieces of a puzzle we put together rather than sharp boundaries between disconnected parts of ourselves. An identity is thus more than just a single trajectory; instead, it should be viewed as a nexus of multimemberhsip. As such a nexus, identity is not a unity but neither is it simply fragmented.

• On the one hand, we engage in different practices in each of the communities of practice to which we belong. We often behave rather differently in each of them, construct different aspects of ourselves, and gain different perspectives.
• On the other hand, considering a person as having multiple identities would miss all the subtle ways in which our various forms of participation, no matter how distinct, can interact, influence each other, and require coordination.

The notion of nexus adds multiplicity to the notion of trajectory. A nexus does not merge the specific trajectories we form in out various communities of practice into one; but neither does it decompose our identity into distinct trajectories in each community. In a nexus, multiple trajectories become part of each other, whether they clash or reinforce each other. They are, at the same time, one and multiple.

When one belongs to different social worlds, being a one person requires what Wenger discusses as reconciliation, the process of constructing an identity that can integrate “different meanings and forms of participation into one nexus” (p.160).

Although usually participation in different social worlds is somewhat separated in time and space (e.g. being a colleague at work and a parent at home, while still maintaining a single identity of a working parent), blogging brings it into a single space and sometimes even into a single moment, when a blogpost is written to capture one’s experiences between those worlds (for example). In this case different forms of participation collapse creating a living resolution of a boundary. In addition, the work of reconciliation, usually very personal and invisible (p.161), leaves publicly visible traces when bloggers use their weblogs in different contexts.

Wenger discusses participative connection across community boundaries as brokering, which is defined as “use of multimembership to transfer some elements of one practice into another” (p.109):

The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end brokering is provides a participative connection – not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multimembership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in practice.

While brokering is not necessarily an intentional activity of a blogger, the co-existence and reconciliation of different perspectives in a singe weblog might results in accidental brokering. In this case elements of practices are transferred across boundaries as bloggers address conflicting interests and translate between different perspectives through their writing – not because they planned to do so but since this is what being able to write in a single weblog requires – providing their readers with an opportunity to “visit” practices different from their own.

In this case weblog provides a window onto practice, supporting learning trough legitimate peripheral participation as it allows “to look through it onto as much actual practice as it can reveal, to see to increasingly greater depths, and to collaborate in exploration” (Brown&Duguid, 1992, for more see Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks). Access to practices of others in this way requires time and effort of picking up contextual cues “between the lines” and establishing relations needed for joint exploration. However, weblogs also provide an alternative way to peek into other worlds that does not necessarily requires the effort of engaging in person, but rather allows connecting through artefacts.

• Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard (2)
• PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory
• On-line scientific publications and blogs

I’m still alive, but quiet: struggling to come up with the first draft of the final chapter of my dissertation and preparing for a conversation at SPsquare research and dissertation fest tomorrow. I’ll be talking about some puzzling things in the blog networking study and my current explanations for them.

Slides and some notes are below, but since it’s very much work-in-progress it might be better to join the discussion tomorrow (20:00 GMT, Skype/phone, contact me for the details) or wait till I blog it.

.

Puzzling things:

• asymmetries – see Getting to know others from a distance
• non-personal relations (“information relationships”, “no ties”) – see Dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it brings
• identity management? – see Presenting oneself trough blogging
• crossing boundaries – see Participants and their networks, Finding and being found, Presenting oneself trough blogging

Blog networking

• Finding and being found
• Getting to know others from a distance
• Bonding through interaction
• Getting things done
• Staying in touch

Publication vs. interaction – will add a link when blogged.

I use weblog of Nancy White as an example, so you may want to check it and the summary of interview with her.

Key publications I refer to:

• affinity/commitment/attention
  • Nardi, B. A. (2005). Beyond bandwidth: dimensions of connection in interpersonal communication. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(2), 91-130. doi:10.1007/s10606-004-8127-9
• crossing boundaries
  • Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(4), 387-420. doi:10.1177/030631289019003001
  • Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.

• Blog as a nexus of multimembership and accidental brokering
• Feed your blog to tOKo and see what comes out
• Weblogs vs. journals

This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

How bloggers find each other? Study participants find new bloggers by attracting them with their own writing, through their network and in places where they meet bloggers they already know.

One way to discover others is writing own weblog, which then serves as “a conversation starter”, “a big neon sign that invites others to come and comment” (Ton). With multiple instruments that weblogs provide it is easy to get notified about comments to one’s weblog or links from other blogs. Bloggers follow trackbacks or subscribe to notification about referrals to their pages (e.g. via Technorati or Google blogsearch). Nancy, who had a web-site people linked to before, credits this attention to incoming links that is part of blogging as the reason for “discovering” people in her network that she was not aware of.

Those who comment on one’s blog writing are not random people. Bloggers appreciate the attention to their own work and the effort taken to comment: “the people who link to you are interesting, because they found your ideas interesting, they comment” (Dave). Monica indicates that commenting on blogs was not the obvious way to grow one’s professional network when she started: “I didn’t realise that linking and giving credits to someone’s work would extend my professional network very quickly”.

Another way to find other bloggers is through following links from people already in one’s own network, who provide filtering and recommendation:

it’s a collective pointing that helps to find stuff, once you have an established group of bloggers you read and trust. And their ability to find a good stuff to point to it increases your signal to noise ratio on the web. [...] Blogs do that better than other tools because of the context – you have to say why that is important, why you are pointing to something. (Euan)

Finally, bloggers find other bloggers in places where they go to interact with those they already know. Although usually these are events that bloggers attend to meet each other in person, they could be online places as well: Ton gives an example of a German blogger whom he first “met” in a comments section of an American weblog.

Given that bloggers indicated that their blogging connections often extremely diverse I ask what exactly contributes to finding others across boundaries. Nancy suggests that it is the public nature of weblogs and their discoverability as a result of cross-linking. She adds that comparing to communities, where there is usually an “agreement what it’s all about even if it’s about nothing”, with a weblog it is more easy “to cross over” between topics both when writing and reading.

This crossing becomes easier as weblogs are person-centred – “a weblog is about me even if you think you write about a topic” (Martin). They also represent different interests of their authors (“most of the times I read them for KM, but find something else”, Gabriela) and readers may value the diversity of topics covered (“good bloggers are eclectics, they do different things, they surprise you [...] that is what keeps you going back”, Dave).

In addition, at first blogging is “connecting through content” (Nancy). When one follows a link to a new weblog, blogger’s words are visible, while the details about the author (such as age, gender, professional affiliations or place in various hierarchies) are not necessarily on the surface or made explicit at all. As a result, with blogging “you can’t live of your reputation, you live of what you say” (Dave).

In the process of discovering interesting others weblogs serve as attractors and filters. From one side presenting oneself to the world through writing a weblog attracts others who resonate with this writing and comment or link back. From other side, weblogs work as filters: links by bloggers one reads provides not only pointing to potentially interesting others, but also personal recommendation. Since weblogs are rather person-centred than strictly focused on a predefined topic, a blogger often writes about a variety of personally relevant issues, exposing readers to potentially new and unexpected topical areas and other bloggers within those.

While finding others may result in a direct interaction (e.g. continuing a conversation in a weblog comments), it is not always so. The following post describes how it is possible to get to know other bloggers from a distance, without any interaction.

• Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
• BlogWalk has started
• Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing

Just because I thought about it while taking a break from writing on PIM and GTD – a quote from Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity by Etienne Wenger that explains in a very nice way the troubles I have with finding confidence while trying to bridge multiple research practices (bold is mine).

Uprootedness is an occupational hazard of brokering. Because communities of practices focus on their own enterprise, boundaries can lack the kind of negotiated understanding found at the core of practices about what constitutes competence. That makes it difficult to recognize or access the value of brokering. As a consequence, brokers sometimes interpret the uprootedness associated with brokering in personal terms of individual adequacy. Reinterpreting their experience in terms of the occupational hazards of brokering is useful both for them and for the communities involved. It can also allow brokers to recognize one another, seek companionship, and perhaps develop shared practices around the enterprise of brokering. [p.100]

• OKLC04: useful links for KM PhDs
• Shrinken horizons
• Dissertation approved :)

Earlier:

• Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction
• Weblog conversations revisited: is there more than one?

So, in our experiments with extracting weblog conversations we’ve got one that included 1000+ blog posts from 34 bloggers. Once we included self-linked posts in the analysis, several independent conversations got “glued” together by chains of self-linked posts, turning the whole thing into a mess.

Looking into self-linking was another of my interests to revisit the original research. For me self-linking is one of the indicators that (some) weblogs are written as a conversation with self:

In the simplest case, a weblog post is fully and only embedded into “a conversation with self”, a personal narrative used to articulate and to organise one’s own thinking. A single blogger could have several of such conversations simultaneously, returning to ideas over time. Next, each of the posts can trigger a conversation with others that can take several rounds of discussions as well. (Efimova & de Moor, 2005: 9)

Anjo and me have discussed a few possibilities to visualise those conversations with self (at least as far as one could do based on self-linking). One was inspired by Thread Arcs of Bernard Kerr from IBM research (which I actually found referenced in a thesis chapter by Manuel Lima describing precedents of Blogviz).

What Anjo did with it is different, but provides a nice way to visualise some patterns:

The above image is an example of a variant on the Thread Arcs idea. Left to right is time, and the arc that links connected posts is filled with a colour: the darker the colour the shorter the time span of the linked posts.

Another example. Visualisations like this can, at the very least, differentiate between those who use their weblog to create an intricate structure of linked posts over a long period of time, compared to bloggers who hardly refer to their own posts.

The final example depicts Lilia’s self-linking practices. I see waves, woods …

In the visualisations you can see clearly that self-linking is more of a personal habit rather than something that every blogger (in our sample) does consistently. Actually, as you can see from the last image, my own weblog is an extreme example of self-linking; others link to their own posts rarely.

Eventually I want to lok at the reasons for self-linking: Why some people do it and others don’t? Is it related to their uses of a weblog to document and organise their thinking? or wanting to inflate google rank? Do people who have easy tools to organise and retrieve their blogs posts (e.g. with categories or tagging) link to themselves less? Is it related to a number of blog posts? to the breadth of topics covered? to some strange personality trait? Does it change over time?

However, those visualisations still help a lot. They indicate that there are probably only several people who (because of chains of their own posts linked to each other) link separate conversations between bloggers into a whole big mess (connectors?). And they help thinking on detangling the mess :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/15.html#a1935; comments are here.

• Results of Seb’s
• Our BlogTalk paper: Shared conceptualisations in weblogs
• Weblogs as a conversational tool

Between PhDs at work we have a saying, quoting our former director, professor Chris Vissers: “PhD is about developing your judgment”. It even part of our family jokes, since Robert and me got into dating just after his PhD party (so, after a couple of years working next door to my office he finally had his judgment right :)

I always felt Chris was right, but over last month I had an opportunity to experience it.

Over last couple of years I’d frequently fall into “low dips of the PhD research” – loosing motivation, believe in my topic, confidence that what I want to do with my PhD research would actually be accepted methodology-wise…

My post about a year ago is pretty much about it:

Today, discussing some of my methodological struggles with a visiting professor I’ve heard once again “if you believe it should be like that just do it like that”. I’ve heard it so many times during my research, but today I looked at it differently – as far as I’m my own source of doubts the process of looking for confirmations from others will last endlessly.

The world is so multifaceted that there always be places of not fitting in, always a space for an improvement. If you write for a feedback there is always a chance of unhappy readers.

I knew it all the way along, but I didn’t really felt that way. I felt lost, struggling with too many fields to comply and methodological boundaries that couldn’t stretch. It also didn’t help that my interests didn’t align well with the expertise of my PhD supervisors, so although I’ve got general support of what I’m doing and a lot of good criticism, I didn’t have as much “thinking along” collaboration as I needed then.

Suddenly things changed. I finally realised that the boundaries I imagined were in my own head and it was only up to me to deal with them. Something flipped inside and I found lost confidence. Then I’ve got in the flow…

I’m trying to figure out what have triggered those changes.

First, I guess, I just became ready to accept them, something to do with my “PhD maturity”, “developing judgement” topic-wise and methodology-wise.

Then, the time off played a role. Once I sorted out shifted priorities and realised that I’m not prepared to became a full-time mom, I knew that if I spent time away from Alexander I should spend it well and make the most out of it. I also realised, during an informal dinner with one of my supervisors, discussing something completely different, that despite all the criticism that I was getting, he actually believed that I was doing a good scientific work.

Or may be I just had my dose of PhD struggling and scientific gods decided that it’s time to stop that and just get work done.

I don’t know, but I’m pretty happy with it :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/07/02.html#a1919; comments are here.

• Lost with PhD ideas
• On personal preferences that shape research
• How to survive a PhD

Browsing my archives and realising that I’d better quote those comments to Context and attribution (12 Feb 2004!) in a blogpost, which is easier to find later.

By Alex Halavais (#):

This is, arguably, easy enough with words, but much harder when it comes to ideas. I came up with some thoughts that, I will assert, are my own. Someone noted that these followed closely some things you had written about in your blog. I am a regular reader of your blog, and I think it is likely that these entries–at the very least–prompted my thinking in a particular direction. This tendency to remember the ideas but forget their source–the “sleeper effect”–has been shown in communication research several times over the last 50 years.

You actually know about this, because someone else made the connection and hyperlinked it. But otherwise, I would have been abscounding with your ideas without due credit. As interersted as I am in encouraging hyperlinking as attribution, there has to be a limit.

I wonder whether a standing set of citations (your “Regular reads/dialogues”) constitutes a kind of “thought group”–an indication that your ideas are at least in some part attibutable to the people you communicate with every day?

By Piers Young (#):

Crikey – all sounds like we’re beginning to enter the murky world of Intellectual Proprty Rights. Have a few brief comments: 1) that this trail is happening at all is a good thing. It underlines the fact that there is value (however intangible) in blogging. 2) I don’t think the “thought group” idea’s is quite enough. Most, or at least many blogs have a “thought group” anyway: a blogroll. Most, or at least many bloggers have diverse interests: they may be into KM and skiing, KM and whiskey or KM and needlecraft or – you get the picture. One of the great things about links is that it allows me to get an idea which blogs most interest me. Without specific citations, I – as let’s say a needlecraft afficionado – would have to wade through a whole load of stuff on marketing, whiskey and skiing. Links, along with a whole load of other good things, help you filter. 3) That said, I agree there has to be a limit. In many cases it just isn’t practical to search all the citations and make all the links. But surely you do as much as you’ve got time for? And with the joys of trackback, bookmarklets etc, you almost by definition have time for one.

Alternating between typing, reading, browsing my weblog and walking around (usually means writing flow :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/12.html#a1908; comments are here.

• ‘Trying to be a researcher’ confession.
• The role of chocolate in PhD research
• Paper abstract: a weblog case to understand knowledge workers

I’ve been thinking for a while on weblogs as boundary objects (and bloggers as boundary subjects :). I don’t think I’m 100% on classical definitions here, but don’t be angry – I need to play with the idea to see what comes out of it.

Also: you may want to read Denham on boundary objects here and here

My interest in blogging pretty much defined by the fact that weblogs cross boundaries – this is where the most of fun lies and the most of troubles occur. So, when conceptmapping some PhD thinking today I came up with this branch (I have to admit that this is not a generic case, but reference to my own research):

So, what shapes my own blogging practices (these are different angles of the same thing):

Contexts where blogging has to fit: my personal practices (e.g. those of dealing with information, technologies or time), practices of people around me (e.g. norms of communication) and practices of the organisation I work for (e.g. regarding confidentiality).

Communities I belong to (this overlaps with the previous category – have to think what to do with it). Those shape at least two aspects – themes that run through my blog and ways of doing things. Theme-wise I’m influenced by topical communities (e.g. KM vs. learning vs. technology), but there are also differences at the level of doing (e.g. researchers vs. practitioners).

Another way to look at blogging is it’s position on the edge between public and private – it has elements of control and safety of my own space and exposure of being in public.

Finally, research-wise my weblog is used in several ways: blogging is a way to participate in the communities I study, it’s an instrument for collecting and analyseing the data and it’s a publication medium. Normally those things would be separated (at least by time, space and audiences).

Semi-related earlier posts (the list is mainly for myself since suprisingly I don’t have a tag where those things would be collected):

• Third culture kids and research kunstkamera
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: blogging as a person or as an employee
• AOIR: Not documenting, doing: blogging as research
• Edges
• Individual in a public space: learning from weblogs and cities
• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• Blog networking, blogwalking and being a boundary subject
• Weblogs: conversations with self and conversations with others
• Personal ways of doing things in public
• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?
• A Socio-Technological Approach to Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/04.html#a1794; comments are here.

• Waarom niet?
• On the role of theory, researcher accountability and translation
• How blogging makes my life difficult

It’s feels strange realising how much my PhD research is influenced by experiences in domains that don’t have much to do with my focus. Since it’s so strong I tend to think that it’s true for other researchers as well and then feel even more strange not finding much traces of those “other domains” in their published work. This, in turn, reinforces my feeling that there is always some degree of “constructedness” in research published – and the more rigorous and logical it looks the more I suspect that the logic was reverse-engineered (no offence meant – this is how I feel even if logics says the opposite :)

Anyway, back to the originally intended topic of this post… Now, getting back into my PhD research and deeper into sorting out methods and methodologies, I realise that my recent reading of Third culture kids (context) provided me with a frame for thinking about my research next to insights of more personal nature.

Between other things the book stresses the influence of growing up between cultures for forming TCK personalities and the world outlook. While we are growing up, our identities are forming against particular cultural backgrounds – specific norms, values and practices are picked up, tried and tested, and, regardless of their “stickiness” in our lives form who we are (you don’t need to drink vodka to be Russian – in anyway your attitude regarding it would be heavily formed by observing those who do, knowing about effects of it, rituals and “safe” good practices of drinking as well as having to deal with the “outsiders” who think that it’s a bigger part of everyday life than it actually is ;). Background culture provides scaffolding by consistent stimulators and reactions. This consistency is important – it’s like a tree that always there for an ivy to crawl around or like a firm arm of your dance partner that is necessary to lead in a way that could be followed.

Growing up between cultures means that another life could be just one flight away, and then everything is changed – the way elders are treated, food is prepared and eaten or friendships are formed. Relocating while growing up means that there is sufficiently long time to absorb each culture, but not enough to be formed by any specific one… Those culture changes bring not only broad outlook on the world, flexibility and knowing exotic languages; they also turn someone into restless and rootless, someone who is always in transition, moving, but never settling, someone who doesn’t know who he is and where he belongs.

Reading the book made the difference clear to me – despite of a few years living abroad I grew up Russian and know where my roots are. In my case multicultural values and practices, although landing on a fertile ground of growing up in a family of mixed ethnic origins, are still just add-ons to the pretty stable core.

However, being mixed up and searching for own people is part of my life – in a totally different context. I feel as “third culture kid”, restless and rootless, research methodology wise.

I guess there are two reasons to it. First, it is doing research (and being enculturated methodology-wise) in a multidisciplinary research institute rather than being a part of a university group with clear set of norms, values and practices regarding research approaches. The second has something to do with weblogs.

Some time back we played with an idea of blogging as distributed apprenticeship, articulating own practices and learning from others often transcending time, distance and disciplinary boundaries. For me blogging has been exactly that – an opportunity to lurk and learn, going beyond expertise and practices available in my immediate surroundings.

Now it bites back. For me reading weblogs of researchers coming from contexts very different from my own brought a permanent exposure to “other” research cultures while I’m still trying to figure out what are the norms and practices of my own tribe (and what is my own tribe, by the way?). In this respect I feel like a kid who moves between different cultures while growing up. I know a lot about differences, fascinating local examples, needs to adapt and to speak the right language, but I don’t know where I belong and which values to stick to. I know that whatever research paradigm you are in the consistency is important, but sometimes I wonder if I can find it wondering in my own kunstkamera* with bits and pieces of research from other worlds…

* Here refers to Kunstkamera in St. Peterburg, founded as a collection of curiousities by Peter the Great and later turned into an ethnographic museum.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/14.html#a1738; comments are here.

• Hypertext writing
• Lessons in Community-Building: An Inquiry into Role of Weblogs in Online Communities
• What I want to do when I’m done with my PhD