It is amazing how much observing Alexander exploring rain tells about human nature: the need for a safe place to start, playing on a boundary alternating between a few more steps to explore and coming back for reassurance, gradually venturing into more and more scary territory, getting confident, having fun while getting wet and cold…

I treasure moments like this – when he grabs my hand and invites me to join the fun, so I can shed the skin of things learned about getting wet and cold in the rain, and instead just be a kid who enjoys the simple fun of being in the rain.

• Back
• Mama’s day: Legitimate peripheral participation
• Back to life

I did an internal talk today, trying to put in a coherent story some results from two studies and emergent ideas about conclusions for my dissertation. I’m not extremely happy with what came out of it, but in case someone wants it – it’s at Slideshare.

Some comments on the stuff covered:

• Study 1 is an analysis of my own blogging practices as related to the development of ideas for the PhD dissertation. It’s an autoethnography that uses my weblog as an input to reconstruct my uses of weblog as a personal knowledge base and as a tool to support process of idea development from early stages to final products. Lots of unsorted background reading is in PhD/Chapter 3 category.
• Study 2 is an analysis of 6320 posts of 34 KM blogs in 2004. The visuals don’t make that much sense without an explanation, which is too complicated to write here. Some background is at:
  • Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction
  • Weblog conversations revisited: is there more than one?
  • Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
  • Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self vs. conversations with others
  • Weblog conversations: the big one
• The last part is an attempt to use ideas from the research about the conditions for emergent social processes in cities (background reading) to explain how satisfying personal interests results in social effects in the case of weblogs and other tools.

Both studies also exist as PhD chapter drafts that I can share with those really interested; final part will appear in some form in the conclusions of my dissertation, due end of the summer.

• Sharing perspectives, quality and KJ-technique
• On the bursty evolution of blogspace
• Blog networking study: bonding through interaction

A little side-trip before I get back to work. Two quotes from two books; something I has been playing with for a long time, but still has to find a proper way into my formal research writing.

Jan Gehl, Life between buildings, on ‘excursions as excuses’:

Among the requirements that are satisfied, in part, in public spaces are the need for contact, the need for knowledge, and the need for stimulation. These belong to the group of psychological needs. Satisfying these is seldom as goal-oriented and deliberate as with the more basic physical needs, such as eating, drinking, sleeping and so on. For example, adults seldom go to town with the expressed intention of satisfying the need for stimulation or the need for contact. Regardless of the true purpose may be, one goes out for a plausible, rational reason – to shop, to take a walk, to get some fresh air, to buy a paper, to wash the car, and so forth.

Perhaps it is wrong to speak of the shopping excursion as a pretext for contact and stimulation, because very few people out shopping will accept the fact that the need for contact and stimulation plays any part in their shopping plans. The fact that adults who work at home on average spend nearly three times as much time shopping as those who work outside the home, and the fact that the shopping excursions are distributed evenly throughout the week, even though shopping once a week would perhaps be easier, make it natural to assume that the many daily shopping excursions are not only a question of getting supplies.

It is general characteristic that basic physical and psychological needs are satisfied at the same time, and that the basic and easily defined needs often serve to explain and motivate the satisfying of both sets of needs. In this context the shopping excursion is both a shopping trip and a pretext, or occasion, for contact and stimulation. [pp. 117, 119]

Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, on ‘props and facilitators’:

The English constantly form clubs and societies for exactly the same reason that we have so many sports and games: we need props and facilitators to help us engage socially with our fellow humans, to overcome our social dis-ease, and we also need an illusion that we are doing something else, that we have come together for some practical purpose, to pursue a specific shared interest, to pool resources in order to achieve something we couldn’t manage alone. […] the real purpose of all these clubs is the social contact and social bonding that we desperately need, but cannot admit needing, not even to ourselves. [p. 251]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/05.html#a1840; comments are here.

• Fun of book reading…
• Distributed Agile: communication and common ground
• Blogging as boundary practice

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.

• Reference to a wiki page???
• Blogs as boundary objects
• Away from blogging

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.

• When they read what we write: respondent identification
• Internet Research 9.0: the highlights
• Post dissertation stress disorder

I’m in the middle of writing deadlines, so just a piece from Life between buildings that was hanging in my blogging notes for ages:

At the edge of the forest or near the façade, once is less exposed than if one is out in the middle of a space. One is not in the way of anyone or anything. One can see, but not be seen too much, and the personal territory is reduced to a semicircle in front of the individual. When one’s back is protected, others can approach only frontally, making it easy to keep watch and to react, for example, by means of a forbidding facial expressions in the event of undesired invasion of personal territory.

The edge zone offers a number of obvious practical and psychological advantages as a place to linger. Additionally, the area along the façade is the obvious outdoor staying area for the residents and functions of the surrounding buildings. It is relatively easy to move a function out of the house to the zone along the façade. The most natural place to linger is the doorstep, from which it is possible to go farther out into the space or remain standing. Both physically and psychologically it is easier to remain standing than to move out into the space. One can always more farther later on, if desired.

It can be concluded that events grow from inward, from the edge toward the middle of public spaces.

When I read this one as a well as lots of examples of places people choose for hanging out in public, it becomes clear that the edge between purely personal and private “my” space and truly social “our” space is important. This is the space for observing, making choices and getting ready to step out into social engagement. This is also the space in between that is so often missing or neglected. I’m thinking of “old” technologies that support either you personally (all stuff that runs on the desktop) or what ever group with shared activity (all kinds of groupware stuff). Being there just to observe before jumping in is lurking and often it’s not considered to be a good behaviour…

I guess it’s a bit cryptic, but if you read me long enough you probably able to connect the dots. Otherwise just wait till words around ideas mature and mould into something readable…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/03.html#a1580; comments are here.

• The power of lurking
• Fun of book reading…
• Too serious?

A slightly edited/linked piece from my proposal for Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2005 (and I’m very excited to be invited :) I have been planning to write a proper weblog post around bullet points at the end, but it’s not happenning fast, so I just post it as it is and come back to it later.

Although weblogs are perceived as low-threshold tools to publish on-line, empowering individual expression in public, there is growing evidence of social structures evolving around weblogs and their influence on norms and practices of blogging. This evidence ranges from voices of bloggers themselves speaking about the social effects of blogging, to studies on specific weblog communities with distinct cultures (e.g. knitting community or goth community), to mathematical analysis of links between weblogs indicating that community formation in the blogosphere is not a random process, but an indication of shared interests binding bloggers together (Kumar, Novak, Raghaven, & Tomkins, 2003).

Social structures emerging around weblogs are interesting for a number of reasons. Weblogs provide spaces for both individual expression and control, and interactions within social ecosystem; hence providing insights of interplays between practices of networked individuals (Wellman, 2002, .pdf) and social structures where those individuals belong. While some weblog communities mirror existing social structures, others emerge when strangers find each other and connect. Weblogs do not provide a shared space with central topic or activity to be attracted to, nor (often) pre-existing community, but do support emergent social connections.

The nature of those connections is especially interesting, since understanding them can help to design environments to support emergence of social structures without predefining their focus or membership. From this perspective blogging is similar to “life between buildings” in a real city that “an opportunity to be with others in a relaxed and undemanding way”. This quote comes from architect Jan Gehl (2001) who discusses how to design public spaces that welcome and support social life.

While reading Gehl’s work I couldn’t avoid associations with insights about “individual in a public space” from my own research (I study uses and effects of blogging for personal knowledge management). I’d like to draw on parallels between real cities and the world of blogging and propose characteristics of a space that supports emergent social activities:

• comfortable, protected space
• conditions for longer-term activities meaningful for an individual
• “soft-edges”, easy switch between inward and outward oriented activities
• opportunities for low-intensity contact: exposure and lurking without a commitment
• “shared space” in between, to move social activity when it grows

These characteristics could be illustrated with examples from other social software applications (del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.) next to weblogs, so I guess they provide a good start for a discussion.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/18.html#a1526; comments are here.

• AOIR: Finding ‘the life between buildings’: An approach for defining a weblog community
• A Topic Sharing Infrastructure for Weblog Networks
• The best part…

There is so much fun in opening a long wanted book after finding the only place it could be ordered and patiently waiting for it to arrive. Fun of waking up and heading for it, before everything. Fun of taking time to read knowing that it would be a long day with lots of things to do. Fun of discovery, nodding at every other page – “ah, true..” – and stopping for a minute thinking all about all those association with your own work…

Of course, sometimes it’s nice to start a day from the blogosphere news, hot and exciting, but somehow this couldn’t beat the fun of reading a well-written book that travelled over five editions and thirty-something years.

And – in case you are curious – the book is Life between buildings by Jan Gehl. It’s part of my reading about cities and thinking about life between weblogs.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/20.html#a1498; comments are here.

• Papers on connections between cyberspace and real cities
• On the role of theory
• Public, private and controlled spaces

A piece from the paper:

An individual weblog is not likely to represent a community, while shared social spaces seem to emerge between weblogs, like in a city where life between buildings accounts for many social activities of its inhabitants. As in cities, blogger communal spaces are not evenly distributed: some neighbourhoods are full of social activities and conversations, while others look like a random collocation of houses where inhabitants have nothing in common. Blogger communal spaces may have visible boundaries, but more often indicators of a community are subtle and is difficult for a non-member to distinguish. Just as a local garden is not likely to have a sign indicating that there is a chess-player community that inhabits it every Sunday, blog communities do not delineate obvious community boundaries.

Somehow city metaphor was hitting me hard during last half a year…

I guess it’s started from A city is not a tree. Then it was reading Emergence and talkings about communities, shared spaces and weblog reading at BlogWalk 2.0, Ton’s post on founding a City in Cyberspace, Torill‘s Dialogue in slow motion at BlogTalk.

And a post by Anna Vallgårda pointing to Life between buildings by Jan Gehl… Just a quote from this book:

Life between buildings offers an opportunity to be with others in a relaxed and undemanding way. One can take occasional walks, perhaps make a detour along a main street on the way home or pause at an inviting bench near a front door to be among people for a short while. One can take a long bus ride every day, as many retired people have been found to do in large cities. Or one can do daily shopping, even though it practical to do it once a week. Even looking out of the window now and then, if one is fortunate enough to have something to look at, can be rewarding. Being among others, seeing and hearing others, receiving impulses from others, imply positive experiences, alternatives to being alone. One is not necessarily with a specific person, but one is, nevertheless, with others.

As opposed to being a passive observer of other people’s experiences on television or video or film, in public spaces the individual himself is present, participating in a modest way, but most definitely participating.

And it’s got connected with lurking, degrees of strength in relation building and some others things that I can’t articulate yet…

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/15.html#a1429; comments are here.

• Archaeology and ethnography in weblog research
• Just citations
• Research on lurking

A summary of The “Swiss Pattada”: Designing the ultimate tool by Giorgio De Michelis (but you should read it yourself :).

The paper uses metaphors of the Swiss Army Knife and the Sardinian Pattada to discuss multiplicity and openess in technologies we use.

Most people have an idea what is the Swiss Army Knife, so just a quote about the Sardinian Pattada:

…this one an Italian pocketknife that dates back to the 15th century [1], is a folding model that opens to a length of 15 to 35 cm (not to be confused with the switchblade). Farmers and shepherds always carried it with them to do all sorts of jobs in the fields or simply to have on hand during long periods away from home. Versions vary depending on the area or region of Italy. [...]

The Sardinian Pattada is available in a variety of sizes and features a sharp myrtle-leaf-shaped blade with a whetted point. The Pattada is suitable for all kinds of tasks, both on the job and in the home (slicing, forking, carving). It’s not only a good means of self-defense, it is also used by shepherds for operating on cattle and for taking care of personal hygiene (shaving, clipping fingernails). Thanks to this universal tool, the shepherd can avoid travelling with a large number of cutting implements.

Although a two-sided bovine horn handle facilitates the Pattada’s multiplicity of uses, the Pattada demands a particular skill in handling. An inexperienced person risks getting hurt with a knife like this, somewhat in the same way he would if—unaccustomed to doing so—he tried to shave with a barber’s straight razor. (pp.46-47)

On multiplicity and openness:

…the Swiss Army Knife is a tool rich in multiplicity and the Sardinian Pattada is rich in openness [3]. An object is multiple if it involves a collection of specialized parts, one for each of the jobs we want to do; it is open if it consists of a single component that we can use for various purposes in various instances. Multiplicity and openness make sense in complex situations in which monofunctional tools are too narrow and rigid. Multiplicity connects well with specialization in that each function finds in it an ad hoc answer, whereas openness connects well with universality because the more an implement can be used for any task at all (including unforeseen ones), the more open it is.

Multiplicity favors the quality of each single function over ease of access to the function, and openness makes it easy to shift from one function to the next at the cost of giving only an approximate answer to each. Thus multiplicity and openness meet the same needs but in diverse ways. We can consider each a different paradigm for dealing with complex situations. (pp.47-48)

Giorgio argues that while in the physical world combining multiplicity and openness (the “Swiss Pattada”) may be impossible, computers make it more and more possible (think of a text editor that supports drawing). He also introduces another attribute: continuity.

Finally, a piece that has something to do with my yesterdays post.

We must also emphasize, however, that, as with objects in general (whether static, mechanical, or electronic), the evolution of computers themselves has not been uniform in achieving greater openness and multiplicity; in many cases development has concerned improvement of a single function, ignoring the question of its integration with multifunction systems. (p.50)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/27.html#a1305; comments are here.

• Waarom niet?
• Blog as an edge zone
• Blogs as boundary objects