Mathemagenic

Referrer logs bring me to the post on high-stakes reflection (mirrors, maps and masks) by Jen:

One of the things I found really fascinating in the e-portfolio literature was Barrett and Carney’s idea of ‘conflicting’ or ‘competing’ paradigms: ‘positivist’ (product-driven, performative, externally assessed, based on externally defined outcomes), vs ‘constructivist’ (process-driven, reflective, learner constructed outcomes) (2005, p7-8). These are also sometimes described as ‘map’ and ‘mirror’ portfolios. [...]

Then I became interested in the extent to which the tension between these ‘conflicting’ paradigms might in fact be an intrinsic part of professional reflective practices. [...]

To describe this, along with ‘map’ and ‘mirror’, I have added a third category: portfolio as ‘mask’. I’ve been working on this metaphor a bit over the past few months and am delighted by its richness - so far I’ve identified at least 6 (overlapping) genres of mask: protection, disguise, performance, memory, transformation, punishment.

This post, together with the one detailing the six mask genres, provides metaphors to think on some of the comments I’ve got on the PhD chapter that looks at blogging PhD ideas. Part of the struggle I had while working on it was drawing the boundaries between the different perspectives I use to look at blogging ideas, (knowledge base / process / context). Although the metaphors do not easily fit onto what I have written (they are also more appropriate for someone looking at blogging from the outside), but they do provide an input for reflecting on it.

The mask metaphor (read the post on six genres) is an interesting one to look at the blogging in the context of my PhD research. Here a quick look on the genres in respect to my weblog research-wise (reordered):

• Memory (trace in the second post) - literally, to keep traces of my thinking.
• Performance / disguise - presenting myself through writing, intentionally and not.
• Punishment - being shaped by the mask, the traces I leave via blogging and the image that others construct of me.
• Transformation - what happens with the ideas as they have been blogged and with my own identity as I go through the process (re: Kamler&Thomson, 2005).
• Protection - the choices I made in bringing blogging back into the dissertation as an instrument to address methodological challenges (a bit here, but more in the paper I’m supposed to write instead of this post). [Update: finished paper - Blending blogging into an academic text]

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Via Hugh MacLeod I come to English Cut, a weblog of Thomas Mahon, “bespoke Savile Row tailor”, which is a facsinating window onto a very specific practice. Apart from lots of insight on good suits and work of people who make them there are a couple of quotes that caught my attention.

On gut feeling in drafting patterns:

…we all prefer to have figures and defined points to work with. These had been obtained by a scientific method, so they had to be right, Right?

Wrong. Because what I found out ‘the expensive way’ was that there were times when I had drafted a pattern, checked and double-checked it, and although the measurements were exact, something still looked wrong.

I was blinded by science, not creativity.

This is something everyone in this or any other business has experienced- a gut feeling that you wanted to listen to, but logic wrongly forced you to ignore. Then sadly you’d proceed down this path, and as soon as you saw the results at the suit’s first fitting, you knew your gut was right all along, and you have to kick yourself.

Often when creative matters are involved, ‘practice makes imperfect’.

And another one on human touch:

OK, I’m sure you’ve gathered by now I want everyone one to wear hand-made. I don’t care if it’s from me, from Savile Row, the guy in Chinatown or the big department store in Chicago, I’m partial and I’m biased. If enough people buy hand-made, that way we’re going to keep the craft going. [...]

By choosing to buy the most humanly-touched products we can afford, or at least striving to do so, we’ll not just benefit the craftsmen out there. It will give you the impassioned knowledge that someone, somewhere, has added a little of their character into your suit. No machine can imitate this. It’s what makes the coat, Bespoke or otherwise, truly unique and frankly, that’s what keeps the customers coming back. Yes, the fact that their coat has a human story behind it makes it seem more special to them.

Funny enough I was about to write another post, saying that I always start reading PhD dissertations from an acknowledgements page, not from introduction or conclusions - for me personal story of an author has to come first and then the rest could follow.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/13.html#a1800; comments are here.

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This Japaneese ad video that came from Alex makes me thinking of other cases where the big picture is not visible instantly… PhD research for example :)

How can you encourage your PhD student?
A bit of trust, a bit of imagination

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/03.html#a1793; comments are here.

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Spotted at Chris Corrigan:

If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/06.html#a1757; comments are here.

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Yesterday I joined Nancy for the videoconference on weblog communities. One of the things that came out of it is the mushroom metaphor: weblogs are like mushrooms - independent individuals on the surface, but interconnected underground.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/07/06.html#a1601; comments are here.

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danah boyd:

I think that it’s hard to be interdisciplinary. I think everyone *wants* to be interdisciplinary but that seems to mean draw haphazardly from different disciplines, throw into the blender, add a few spices and voila interdisciplinary gazpacho. I want a chemical reaction dammit.

The problem with being interdisciplinary is it that means staying in a state of perpetual identity crisis. I think that this is fundamentally hard for academics. Many of us grew up as ostracized freaks and geeks and felt such glory in fitting in. There’s something desperately comforting about fitting it, about being amongst peers. Staying in-between, outside and perpetually bridging any dichotomous definitions is exhausting. I think about how many people i know who identify as someone in-between (fe)male but eventually chose to identify as one or the other. Alternatively, i think about inter-racial identities and how some of my friends happily proclaim the identity of hapa. When no identity out there works, you end up developing a new one. Of course, this happens in academia all the time. There are new interdisciplinary departments popping up daily in academia.

Thinking of identity crising and staying in-between… Wondering what is necessary for the chemical reaction…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/05/12.html#a1576; comments are here.

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Yesterday I watched Ray Mears’ Bushcraft: Aboriginal Britain. At a certain moment Ray Mears was looking at different flint tools and said something about understanding a culture via understanding tool people use. I immediately thought about a parallel with my PhD research (a hungry person sees food in everything :)

I study personal knoweldge management, but since it’s often invisible (implicit, embedded or locked in personal spaces) I study it via tools (weblogs to be more specific ;).

For an archaeologist studying tools is pretty logical - there could be thousands years after a culture has dissappeared, so artefact (tools, buildings, art, etc.) is all what is left for today’s researcher. In my case (studying today’s “culture”) “archaeology” is a good way to start, but I also try to complement it with “ethnography”.

And, then I write this, I get two more associations. The first one is with the comment of Tom Erickson on Jones’ Virtual settlement paper during our discussion on weblog communities at HICSS. (Jones argues against equating virtual communities with the cyber-places (e.g. IRC channel or web-based forum) they inhabit. He compares virtual community research to archaeology and suggests studying a community through artefacts of its virtual settlement.) Tom’s remark was about limitations of choosing archaeology to study online communities if they are pretty much alive.

The second one is about Elijah Wright’s note on BROG anniversary (Happy birthday, BROG!):

Our project, starting from humble beginnings, has been audaciously successful. We’ve done well at stirring up debate and discussion, particularly where qualitative researchers are concerned. [They typically don't really appreciate content analytic methodologies, it seems -- which is kind of crazy. We're reporting *what's there*, not what we *think* is there.]

I’d classify content analysis as archaeology, so my “concerns” in this specific case would be similar to Tom’s comment on a general case of online communities - “archaeology” has its limitations. To be a bit more specific:

Interpreting the meaning of artefacts (e.g. inferring that link in a blogrol indicates a relation) requires understanding of a culture where artefacts are produced and there are many different blogging cultures. So, I wonder about specific interpretations of artefacts “behind” any quantitative analysis, conclusions made based on those interpretations and potential for generalising the results.

It doesn’t mean that content analysis is not valuable (and BROG researchers make great contributions to the field :), but it would be nice to see reasons for choosing “archaeology” in a case of studying live culture and limitations of this choice articulated more explicitly.

And - note to myself - see also experimental archaeology

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/28.html#a1508; comments are here.

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Jack Vinson:

Since Lilia is having difficulty posting to her blog while traveling, I am going to take the liberty of blogging a thought she had as we walked around the Art Institute of Chicago’s Impressionist collection.

A single blog post is a spot of color in a Seurat painting or a dash of color from Monet. A single weblog taken as a whole over time might paint a small picture or it might reveal some color gradations - more likely it will reveal many patches of a larger canvas. But when you stand back from that single post or that single website, the picture begins to reveal itself in the writings of all the other bloggers (and websites and forums) with whom the individual interacts. I believe this is what Anjo Anjewierden et. al. are doing with their visualizations of blogs as Visual Settlements.

:)))

Have no idea when this post will get online - Radio still doesn’t behave :(

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/20.html#a1481; comments are here.

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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.

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A piece I guess I have to cut out from a paper I’m trying to finish:

Weblogs serve many purposes. Like a pen could be used to write a diary, a novel, a letter to a friend, or just a shopping list pinned to a fridge door, weblogging tools can be used in a variety of ways. For instance, they can provide a venue for self-expression, serve as a community space or be used to publish formal corporate news.

That was my reaction on the whole “weblog as a genre” discussion. Do you study “pen as a genre”?

See also: blog research issues

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Update:

Of course my commenters are right - I stretched it too far (not the quote, but the commentary ;). Weblog is not a pen, but blogging software is.

Still you don’t study all what is written with a pen as a single genre (at least according to my not professional understanding of what genre is :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/14.html#a1351; comments are here.

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