In my dissertation I describe uses of weblogs as a sense-making instrument that provides a way to deal with unexpected or complex ideas by supporting articulation and organising ideas at a personal level combined with distributed collaborative thinking in “sense-making networks“. While exploring this theme as part of the content of my research was somewhat expected, I did not realise how much reflecting on practices of others and my blogging experiences in that respect would challenge my research methodology-wise.

Blogging research not only turned into participatory research and involving others as co-researchers. As I experienced the flexibility of organising my thinking with the weblog, as well as the fun and added value of the social nature of it, it became more and more difficult to use conventional data analysis methods and tools.

As it’s easy to attribute to my own personality or strange choices, I was glad to hear that I’m not alone in it. Stuart French on blogs as study tool (once you are there check University 2.0 too):

The real research is happening in NVivo, but I find that I do a lot of my thinking better in a blog than a analytic memo, so I started interchanging the two. If a memo was about a specific data or participant then in went into NVivo and was linked, but the more general thoughts about underlying cause/efect relationships, theories in the literature and in use by the participants to make sense of their environments…they end up in the blog.

More and more though, I find the challenge of writing for public consumption adds something of an edge to the process of analysis so many of the recent posts have been to this blog rather than my private one.

In my own case blogging came before I made a choice for specific data analysis methods or considered using tools for qualitative data analysis. When I tried some of them, I missed two things in comparison to blogging: flexibility of dealing with fuzzy data and emergent assumptions, and an easy way to involve of others in the process . While on the technology side including those capabilities in the research tools is probably just a matter of time, I believe that addressing them methodology-wise provides a bigger challenge.

My experiences of sense-making as a flexible, intuitive and messy process raise questions about finding a methodologically sound way to accommodate for those:

If expertise is difficult to articulate, how would you specify (for example) explicit coding criteria to pinpoint patterns? How far the need to make things explicit, to categorise beforehand would ruin the richness of what could be found? How far the decisions on what are the patterns could be logically explained? How easily the process itself could be articulated for an examination by others?

The social nature of sense-making with blogging indicates other challenges. While action research methodologies do provide a way to include others in research, the ways of doing so rely on having a shared goal and cycles of planning, action and reflection. In the case of blogging research involvement of others is unplanned, casual, and fragmented. It is those characteristics that make involvement of others especially valuable (re: exposure and unexpected connections across boundaries), they difficult to account for methodologically.

• Weblog research ethics
• Interviewing over IM
• Methodology chapter: posting parts online

Collecting relevant links for my talk on blogging research yesterday I realised that a piece explaining my current view of the process is missing. So, a little story is below. It’s an edited piece from the dissertation chapter on blogging PhD ideas, There I reconstruct my own process of growing ideas from the moment they appear as fuzzy unarticulated feelings to turning them into some tangible outcome as part of my work. I distinguish three phases in this process: awareness and articulation, sense-making and turning ideas into a product.

The first phase is awareness and articulation. This is the moment when a certain idea (or an aspect of it) first comes to my radar, either being brought by others or articulated as a result of reflecting on my own experiences or choices. I join those two together as they are often interrelated. Personal experiences shape what I pay attention to in interactions with other people, while articulation of my own thoughts is often prompted by events or conversations that involve others.

Once ideas appear on my mental radar they go through a sense-making phase: discovering different aspects of an idea, the meaning of it to me and its connections with other ideas.

Finally, there is a moment when ideas are ripe and the process of turning them into specific products is started. In my case it is doing research and reporting about it, usually in a form of an academic publication.

These phases do not have clear boundaries between them. While being engaged in a sense-making process around an idea I may become aware of or articulate new aspects of it; working on making an idea part of a product often prompts additional rounds of sense-making. Also, there are many ideas that grow at the same time, so multiple processes like the one described above go in parallel.

• On blogging and book writing
• On book writing
• Bloggers cited in the dissertation

Blogging PhD research and what happens next – presentation (an attempt of zen :) for the panel “New modes of scholarly communication: blogs, wikis, and web2.0 in academia” at Berlin 6 Open Access conference, November 11-13 2008, Dusseldorf, Germany.

[Video of the presentation]

In the talk I decided to talk about my experiences of blogging research to make it as relevant as possible to other researchers, so I focused primarily on connections between it and the process of growing ideas and turning them into a publication. It doesn’t give a good overview of blogging in respect to research methods and methodologies (some readable insight on it is here).

Links for more background on parts of the talk:

• Process of growing ideas: from fuzzy feelings to finished results
• Fuzzy ideas: awareness and articulation
  • Things that don’t fit
  • Blogging as creating space for important
  • Reasons for using weblog to keep information bits
• Sense-making
  • Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit
  • PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory
  • Weblog and the mess of papers on my desk play similar roles in supporting my work
• Turning into an outcome
  • If most of the things I want to say in my PhD are already in my weblog, what’s the added value of the dissertation?
• Issues related to doing networked research
  • Blogging research: attribution and ownership of ideas
  • Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report
  • Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text (it discusses blogging from a methodological perspective; relevant in this case for the discussion about research quality issues and ethical challenges of studying bloggers)

I know it bugs for being turned into a readable paper. Will work on that after finishing the dissertation (soon, submitting first draft as a whole in three weeks!), but any comments on where it makes sense to publish is are very welcome.

• Finding confidence
• On blogging and book writing
• On research again…