[When I talked about it with Bev in Copenhagen I realised it might be worth writing down]

I started my PhD research with an idealistic target to create something that people would read and find useful. As I worked on it the “people” turned into bloggers, my peers on the quest of figuring out where weblogs fit in knowledge-intensive environments. They were the audience that I wanted to reach with my work.

I didn’t realise that doing PhD research is extremely slow comparing to the fun of playing with new ideas in my professional community. As I moved beyond the early studies into doing research and writing about it, I felt more and more being behind. There were a few “objective” reasons to stop reading other blogs, but also  an emotional one next to them: reading about new ideas people in my network were playing with made me feel working on “yesterday’s news”. It also made clear that my work wasn’t that interesting for my imagined audience, so I was losing my main motivation to do it.

I struggled with it for a while. As I eventually figured out the problem was in my own expectations and I had the answers in the first paper I wrote on weblogs that I mechanically copy-pasted into the introduction chapter of my dissertation. I wanted to study blogging to get an understanding of where it fits for the “pragmatists” who come after “enthusiastic early adopters”, yet it’s early adopters I imagined as my audience.

That changed everything. As I realised that I’m not writing for my “early adopter” peers, but for people who were only getting into blogging, it suddently made more sense.

• Theories/Practices of Blogging in Reconstruction (Vol. 6, No. 4, 2006)
• Interviewing over IM
• Internet Research 9.0: the highlights

For quite a while I’ve been on a conference abstinence track – not submitting papers and limiting attendance in order not to get distracted from the PhD writing.

That’s said, I’m extremely happy writing a paper and going to Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen. It was intense (especially given that I didn’t finish a PhD chapter before leaving) and insightful – it feels that I had all the conversations put on hold over last year in four days… And, the best thing of that came out of it is – somehow having all those conversations really helped me to feel that “I’m there” PhD-wise. Of course, there is still lots of writing to be done, but that feels more like working out all the loose ends and making threads that go through different pieces more visible and more strong. The conference was also good to start thinking about the post-PhD life – reflecting on what topics and people I was drawn to helps to get a feeling of where I’ll be heading next.

I hope to be able to write on some of the themes in more detail, so just the highlights to remember what to write about (I may also come back and edit this post with more ideas and links):

• a distinction between friendship-based and interest-based participation and learning in a keynote by Mimi Ito (notes by Axel Bruns), loosely corresponding to maintaining existing connections and creating new ones
• thinking about online places – their differences from physical places and co-presence as a way of constructing them – and ways of studying (in) them
  • communities, online places and participation; multiple places + multi-membership
  • experienced as an individual and implications for research and practice
• learning: community-based, (duad) relation-based, artefact-based?
• different ways to look at privacy: episodes, aggregations over time, patterns, lifestreaming triangulations
• blogs
  • blogs as transitional objects (find the paper!)
  • exploring identity and constructing identity in one space; changes over time
  • crafts online and research on mommy-blogging (loved to see research done on things I am exposed to via non-work blog reading)
• researching fast changing fields – audiences and expectations (later:
  Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations)

Twitter notes from two ‘communities’ session on the last day are here.

• Growing pains of virtual communities
• Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks
• Blogging and paper writing

Just finished and submitted :)

Efimova, L. (2008). Blending blogging into an academic text. Paper submitted IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge, workshop at Internet Research 9.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-18 October 2008.

Abstract. For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. As I work on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, blending blogging into an academic text to bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me, this paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it, and then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.

Looking forward to the workshop – the list of the workshop participants and their papers is intriguing…

• Understanding and developing knowledge work practices
• Weblog research: artefacts and practices
• Research methodology: everything is relative