Just to unload somewhere the ideas coming from conversations at Hypertext 2009 and reading an advance copy of Reading Hypertext (thanks, Mark!) on the way back.

[I'm not an expert in hypertext as a field of study and these are my "thinking aloud" notes when trying to understand it].

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I think it makes sense to distinguish between

• hypertext as a presentation format – e.g. what we encounter on the web
• hypertext works – e.g. hypertext fiction, written to use the format to impact readers in specific – not always predictable – ways by (probably intentionally) connecting presentation-plot-story into a whole
• conceptual hypertext – the conceptual principles of how it works/could work and why that is interesting and valuable

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There was some discussion on difficulties of reading hypertext and the rightful comment by Mark that it shouldn’t be something special since people somehow manage to deal with reading the web. I don’t think that the hypertext as a presentation format is a problem, but from what I’ve seen/read so far it seems that reading hypertext works might be. The challenge is very much about cognitive model (re: Reading Hypertext, chapter 5 by Lowe, I’m only half way through it!) that requires more conscious reading (probably coming from the need to keep all three panels Lowe describes active at the same time to be able to get the story).

I can imagine that in some cases there is also conceptual overhead and usability overhead: the need to understand the principles behind hypertext (=some of what I call conceptual hypertext) and the learning needed to adjust reading behaviour to the particular hypertext system. I’d suggest that it’s those things that could make reading hypertext works difficult for those who don’t have a problem of dealing with hypertext presentations.

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We had a few interesting conversations about weblogs and hypertext. I don’t have any problems agreeing that a weblog is hypertext when we talk about hypertext-as-presentation-format, but woludn’t equate blogging to writing hypertext works. There is more to think and to write about in this respect, but what I think matters most is the (lack of) intentionality in blogging, focus on an individual rather than a story and the time, telling bits and pieces about various stories as they unfold, so there is no way of knowing that the something that appears in the text today will actually fire later the way Chekhov’s gun does.

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Wondering if those who build hypertext tools are busy more with conceptually perfect tools rather than those that serve a purpose/easy to use/fit with the rest of things people do online.

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Since I was asked a couple of times about it I’ll probably come up with what tools I might need as a blogger, but I can already say that I don’t need tools. I need plug-ins and mashups that use conceptual hypertext ideas to turn what I already have on my weblogs into something that works better for me and/or those who come across it.

• Affectionate writing reduces cholesterol
• On things that hide behind typical formats of reporting research
• The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think

The deadline for submitting this paper was just a couple of weeks before the due date for my dissertation, so I hesitated a lot deciding to work on it. I’m glad I did: it provided a great opportunity to transform the insights from the study of my own practices of using weblog as an instrument to develop PhD ideas (Chapter 3 of the dissertation) into something that can live its own life.

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)

Abstract. While weblogs have been conceptualised as personal thinking spaces since their early days, those uses have not been studied in detail. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a weblog can contribute to the process of developing ideas in a long-term complex project. To do so I use autoethnography to reconstruct my personal blogging practices in relation to developing PhD ideas from two perspectives. I first discuss my practices of using a weblog as a personal information management tool and then analyse its uses at different stages in the process of working on a PhD dissertation: dealing with fuzzy insights, sense-making and turning ideas into a dissertation text. The findings illustrate that next to supporting thinking in a way private notebooks do, a weblog might serve similar roles as papers on one’s office desk: dealing with emerging insights and difficult to categorise ideas, while at the same time creating opportunities for accidental feedback and impressing those who drop by.

© ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557963 [This is the first time I actually tried to negotiate something different from the default copyright agreement; it didn't work.]

See also: short, practitioner oriented version of the insights from this paper – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas

• In the train…
• PhD writing done, future workspaces and blogging
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography

[This has been in drafts for a while, so don't be surprised with the date :)]

Following PhDs across the globe on Twitter helps to realise that the process and customs for a PhD differ between countries. For example, from what I understand in the US, dissertations are not published; a dissertation might be shared as unpublished version and/or converted into a book to be published. In the Netherlands PhD dissertations are usually published as books. The text is not adapted; instead, it’s formatted nicely and turned into a book with a cover and few extras.

So, my dissertation will be published too. Finishing it to be evaluated by the PhD committee was tough, but it did not feel definite, since I knew I could change a few minor things. I did not realise then that sending it to a printer is much scarier as it is definite: it will go public in that form.

The things that make it difficult are those that I should be comfortable with, given what I blog and I study blogging – passion, imperfections and confessional writing.

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Historically dissertations in the Netherlands are accompanied by stellingen, propositions that sum up one’s PhD work. I always saw them as an outlet that reflects the author’s values/thinking/reflections in relation to the work done. I anticipated the pleasure of writing stellingen – as a legitimate part of the dissertation that would reflects my passions and my beliefs – and I even wrote the first version of “stellingen-to-be” in 2004.

To my surprise I did not feel like doing it when finishing my dissertation. Given that in Utrecht University, where I defend it, stellingen are not required as a formal part of the dissertation, I decided to go without stellingen.

I guess the main reason behind not writing something, which I view as a personal stance behind an academic work, is that I put all what I wanted to say in the stellingen in the dissertation itself. In that sense, the dissertation title “Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers” reflects not only the content, but also the format of it: my own passions are present throughout the book, in the choices of topics, methods and ways to write about those.

It is scary to get that printed as a book: while being present as an author and confessional writing is normal and even desired in a weblog, this is not the case with most of the academic work. As a reader of confessional academic texts I know how helpful it is to see someone’s far-from-perfect work-in-progress, but it is scary to write such a text myself even if I believe that this is important.

Learning to show imperfections of my own research was a big part of the PhD process. In that respect I just loved the way Penelope Eckert puts it (in a “How I Write” conversation which is part of the series of conversations about writing with academics at Stanford University):

..the purpose of writing is not simply to tie a neat package around what was really frequently a very flawed process, but to actually discuss the flawed part of the process, because people can learn from that and I can learn from that, too.

She explains how it became part of her writing choices:

…one of the things that I am most concerned with in academics, because that’s where I live, is lack of confidence, insecurity. I was plagued by lack of confidence as a student and for years, and I know when my own students are plagued by lack of confidence; and the thing we learn to do in academics is to cover it up and act really cool. And when we do research we get—and when you teach—I remember as an assistant professor learning to act how I knew more than I did. And in research, learning how to make the final product look as if there had been no glitches beforehand, or as if everything had been done perfectly. And all that is doing is contributing to other people’s insecurity, and it doesn’t help mine because I know that I have been covering up.

Having been there myself I find it important to break the tradition and to make sure that I don’t add to other people insecurities by showing a polished version of my research. I try not to cover up in my dissertation, so it has a lots of traces of my passions and imperfections of what I did. But gosh, confessional writing is a scary thing to do, especially since doing it in an academic document is an art by itself (and I’m not sure that I mastered it :).

Well, the good thing is that the dissertation is out of my hands now. I can be scared as I want, but at least nothing could be done about it. And, hopefully, blogging about those fears helps someone else to get over theirs, pretty much as danah boyd‘s posts on sharing her dissertation online helped me to deal with my own.

danah in Taken Out of Context — my PhD dissertation

Knowing that I would share my dissertation publicly, I desperately wanted to create a perfect dissertation. Anyone who has been through this process knows how impossible that is. [...]

There was a huge part of me that wanted to hole up and not share this document with you, for fear of your criticism. This is not a perfect document. Not even close. There are holes in my argument structure, problems with my description, and loads of places where I can’t help but smack my forehead at my simplicity and lack of depth. With all of its imperfections, there is one very important thing about this document: it is done. And by the end of the process, I accepted the age-old PhD mantra: the only good dissertation is a done dissertation.

and in licensing your dissertation under Creative Commons

Part way through my dissertation, I realized that I had never read a dissertation. I was surprised to find that very few people make their dissertations easily available. Why? In some senses, the diss is quite embarrassing. It’s imperfect. You’re sick of it. But there are huge advantages to making it available. At the very least, it allows future students to get a sense of what they should expect. (There was nothing more nerve-calming than realizing that my mentors’ dissertations were totally sloppy at points.)

I will share my dissertation online, very soon. It’s under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 (that’s another story of learning from danah and other PhDs who wrote about their experiences :)

• Draft chapter for a review: Blogging PhD ideas
• Discovering your passion
• A year of passion

[There are still few things I might fix on this page]

This pages includes references to the people weblogs of whom I cite or discuss in some way in my dissertation. It is here for two purposes. First, as an easy way to jump from the printed dissertation text to the specific weblogs that appear there. Second, as a way to notify bloggers that quotes from their blogs (or links to them) appear in the dissertation text (a version of this page also appears as a blog post to make trackbacks and indexing work better).

If you are the blogger listed here you might want to know that:

• I treat weblogs as a publicly available texts and do not ask permissions for citing them. The reasons for this and other choices in respect to referring to bloggers in my dissertation are discussed in the research ethics section of it.
• If you have a concern about your weblog being cited, I’m happy to share the text where it appears and remove the citation if you have a reason for doing so. This could only be done until the dissertation text is finalised (somewhere end of April-mid May 2009), so if you have a concern it’s the time to act.

My own weblog

Since many of my own weblog posts appear in the dissertation, I do not provide an extensive list here. All references to my weblog are accompanied by the title and the date, which could be used to retrieve them:

• by title: use the search field
• by date: go to blog.mathemagenic.com/year/month/day/ (e.g. blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/06/21/ for 21 June 2002); scroll if there are multiple posts on the page to find the right one

Alternatively, you can also browse cited blog posts per chapter: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

Weblogs of others

Bloggers are listed in the alphabetical order according to their surnames (blog titles if I couldn’t figure out the name); next to the names I include blogs that (I think) identifies the blogger best at the moment of making this list (March 2009). Titles of the specific posts cited are linked to the pages where I originally found them or, if those were moved, where they could be accessed in March 2009. The list excludes bloggers cited anonymously and those, who’s academic work is cited without discussing their weblogs.

• Joshua Allen, Better Living through Software
  • (Chapter 6) Leaf Nodes, 26 May 2003
• Monica Andre, B2OB
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Gabriela Avram, Coniecto
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Alex Barnett, Alex Barnett blog
  • (Chapter 6) Why am I moving my blog? 2 September 2006
• Lee Bryant, Headshift
  • (Chapter 4) An interesting conversation about turning ideas into action, 1 December 2003
• Shawn Callahan, Anecdote
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Mark Dykeman, Broadcasting Brain
  • (Chapter 4) Self-linking could make you go blind, 10 September 2008
• Diane Greco, [narcissism, vanity, exhibitionism, ambition, vanity, vanity, vanity]
  • (Chapter 4) I couldn’t find the original quote longer online, appears as quoted by Mark Bernstein in Social, 4 December 2004
• Alex Halavais, a thaumaturgical compendium
  • (Chapter 3) Comment to my post Context and attribution, 12 February 2004
  • I also cite Alex’s academic publications in a various places of the dissertation
• Stuart Henshall, Stuart Henshall’s blog
  • (Chapter 4)
    • Actionable Sense, 3 December 2003
    • From Conversational Blogging to Jazz Communities, 1 December 2003
• Internet Duct Tape
  • (Chapter 4) The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion, 18 March 2008
• Gretchen Ledgard, Microsoft’s JobsBlog
  • (Chapter 6) The talent landscape, and why I’m ready to lose it, 1 June 2005
  • (Chapter 6) My thoughts on the CNET article, 8 June 2005 (The link redirects to microsoftjobsblog.com, where I wasn’t able to find this post. A copy of the original post is available at archive.org.)
• Josh Ledgard, evolvingWe
  • (Chapter 6) Prototype of Forums Instant Answers, 3 August 2005
• Julie Lerman, Don’t Be Iffy
  • (Chapter 6) What Raymond Chen wants to be sure we know (PDC), 15 September 2005
• Anoush Margaryan, Charting the Labyrinths
  • (Chapter 5) Blogs, information relations and imaginary friends, 22 November 2008
• Dina Mehta, Conversations with Dina
  • (Chapter 4)
    • Comment to Ton Zijlstra’s post Making Actionable Sense, 28 November 2003
    • Blogs – turning ideas into actions, 28 November 2003
    • Turning ideas into action (2) – corporate blogging, 2 December 2003
• Judith Meskill, socmediarocks
  • (Chapter 4) actionable cohorts…, 24 December 2003
• Brett Miller, Theoria cum Praxi
  • (Chapter 4) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Torill Mortensen, Thinking with my fingers
  • I refer to Torill and her weblog in the introduction sections of Chapters 2 and 3
  • I also cite Torill’s academic publications in a various places of the dissertation
• Dave Pollard, How to Save the World
  • (Chapter 2) The blogging process, 30 July 2003
  • (Chapter 3) Blogs in Business – The weblog as filing cabinet, 3 March 2003
  • (Chapter 4) Dave’s linking patterns in 2004 are visualised and discussed
• Martin Roell, Gute vragen
  • (Chapter 4) Unverfolgte Ideen, sichtbar, 23 November 2003
  • (Chapter 5)  summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Dave Snowden, Dave’s blog
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Euan Semple, The Obvious?
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Luis Suarez, Elsua
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teacher – Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson
  • (Chapter 6) Keeping it light, 15 August 2005
• Paolo Valdemarin, Paolo’s weblog
  • (Chapter 4) Not all feeds require the same polling frequency, 10 September 2004
• Nancy White, Full Circle Associates
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices
• Volker Will, VolkerW’s WebLog
  • (Chapter 6), Intense desire to blog, 18 August 2005
• Ton Zijlstra, Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts
  • (Chapter 4)
    • Making Actionable Sense, 27 November 2003
    • Relationships above information exchange, 4 March 2006
    • Making Actionable Sense III, 14 December 2003
    • Ton’s linking patterns in 2004 are visualised and discussed
  • (Chapter 5) summary of the interview on blog networking practices

• Or: personal knowledge productivity
• How far from activity theory?
• PhD crisis…

Judith Olson in HCI remixed (my sneaky reading when I don’t want to do any PhD writing):

But for me, probably the most important filter on whether or not something is interesting is to tell someone the story. This is a variation on the old saw, “I don’t know what I think until I hear what I say.” In the act of telling the story to someone else, you attempt to frame it in its most interesting surprising way. And, then by seeing the reaction, you can tell whether it is truly interesting or not. (p.232)

That’s why blogging as a way to write research works for me – it’s telling stories to someone else.

I spent half a day  “jumping between dissertation and wordpress since I don’t know where the piece I want to write should go first” (twitter). Finally wrote it as a dissertation section. Decided to blog – and then immediately saw where it has to be revised. Remembered the quote from last night’s reading. Had to write this post.

• The wedding dress and other cases of revisiting the past
• Refactoring in the backstage
• #ht09: some thoughts on hypertext

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.

• PhD blogging and paper writing
• Paper: Weblog as a personal thinking space
• Why storytelling works?

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.

• Third culture kids and research kunstkamera
• Sense-making: from blogging to research methodologies
• On publishing autoethnography

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…

• 1/2 page description of my PhD research
• OKLC04: on knowledge work
• Internet Research 9.0: the highlights

Working on a paper on how I bring blogging in the text of my dissertation, I finally get to write a bit more on When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography promised long time ago. Although the book is well worth reading as a whole for anyone interested in relations between a researcher and those participating in the research, one of the papers is a must read for those studying bloggers:

• Sheehan, Elizabeth A. (1993). The student of culture and the ethnography of Irish intellectuals. In C.B.Brettell (Ed.), When they read what we write: the politics of ethnography (pp. 75-89). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

In the paper the author tells about the challenges of representing in a research report academics she studied: public intellectuals, “who earn their living in large part through their ideas” (p. 81).

It is a cliché to say that knowledge is power, but in the case of informants who are intellectuals, knowledge is also capital, symbolic and otherwise. Here too the boundaries between public and private forms of information become confused, merge, and cross over to opposite sides in the exchange between anthropologist and informant. As a results, ethnographic writing about academics and intellectuals raises serious issues of intellectual attribution. [...] As intellectuals, many academics create their lives through their work, and their work through their lives. Interviews with such information can provide exhilarating insight for the ethnographer (Yes! Yes! This is what I mean!), brought to a sudden halt by the realization that the ideas you are now thinking – and thinking of writing about – are not entirely your own at all but the product of mutual intellectual exchange. How to you correctly ascribe ideas that are offered within the context of an interview but which may also be the basis of new works, new publications? How do you separate the public thinker from the private, honour his confidentiality and intellectual property, and still offer a meaningful analysis? (Sheehan,1993, p.81)

This one has direct connections to my early questions on weblog research ethics in respect to he choices between protecting privacy of the participants and recognising their authorship. Browsing through the referrals to my post on attribution and ownership of ideas when blogging research I came across a nice summary of the issue from a research participant side in a post by Frank Carver (bold is mine):

One of my current concerns is the tension between perceived needs one the one hand for attribution, academic traceability and ownership of ones own words; and on the other hand for privacy. This is seen in sharpest relief in solicitations for academic surveys. Routinely such instruments come with a disclaimer pointing out that all answers will be anonymous. Well-structured surveys and questionnaires, though, often also contain a section for general comments and feedback. In most cases I do not want this to be anonymous – indeed I would rather it formed part of a dialogue between the researcher and subjects, allowing both to benefit, learn and develop.

I am considering taking up a habit of always adding my contact details to academic survey submissions to deliberately challenge the assumption that I wish to be an anonymous donor of information, and to encourage researchers to participate in a community of interest.

The stress on mutual benefits is important: often it’s not only the researcher who learns new things, but also people who participate in the research, when their thinking on a subject is triggered as a result of an interaction. Elizabeth Sheehan gives a nice example that the challenges of attributing the ideas in a case like this one may also exist on the participant’s side:

I might add that this process can work both ways, but with less ethical difficulty for the informant. I was both flattered and dismayed to see some insights of mine appear in the Irish Times, unattributed, under the byline of an academic I had interviewed a few days earlier. He had no need, as had I, to sort out his ides from my own in a setting which was, for him, just and interesting discussion with another academic. (Sheehan,1993, p.81)

Another issue that the paper touches is the one I had to deal myself: the need to represent research participants in a way that multiple parts of their input could not be attributed to the same person (in When they read what we write: respondent identification). An example from the paper:

…his identity had to be fragmented. In the dissertation he becomes several people, not my the questionable device of pretending he was really a number of different individuals, but simply by my failing to inform the reader that “one professor,” “another commentator,” and so forth who appear throughout the dissertation are actually one person. Consequently, this single individual is discessed as the unnamber center of the appointment controversy, as an anonymous example of the links between scholarship and party politics, as an attributed commentator on his research discipline, and as a published sources on his research specialty. (Sheehan,1993, pp.83-84)

• Media literacy: from reading to writing and beyond
• Writer’s block :)
• Challenges on writing literature overview on business blogging (or another turn on researcher vs. blogger)

About a year ago I looked for Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers) – I wanted to find a relatively objective way to judge how much of my weblog writing ends up in the dissertation.

Between other things I experimented with generating and comparing tagclouds from texts that were supposed to correspond to each other. I tried several tools, but ended up with tagCrowd since it allowed using generic and custom-made lists of stop words.

As an experiment I used text of five dissertation chapters (draft versions as of April 17, 2008) and the text of blog posts coded as corresponding to those chapters to generate a visualisation of most frequent words in each case. After removing stop words (general English plus those from my own list that I was stupid enough not to save) 65 most frequent words are visualised.

For example, two tagclouds below are those from the blogposts related to the Microsoft study and the draft chapter with the results of it.

In total I had 5 pairs of visualisations. I then mixed them and asked five people familiar with my research (supervisors and collaborators) and eight students (taking a class with Anjo) to find matching pairs. The results are below.

Some comments:

• I guess there is a connection between PhD chapters and blogposts :)
• The high score for the methodology chapter is explained by its qualitative difference from the rest of the dissertation.
• The low score for this chapter is explained by the fact that the coding of weblog entries in relation to chapters was done prior to writing it. As a results it included many “might be relevant” posts, while for other chapters the focus was more clear. In addition, the draft version of the chapter used to generate the visualisation was the first draft, while in other cases those were revised several times.

It was nice to see that although many of the visualisations looked similar (with blogging and weblog being big ;) it was actually possible to match the pairs. But the nicest thing was simply making all those pictures, laying them on the floor and thinking that I actually had some version of 5 chapters out of the 7 :)

• Don’t tell me how to blog
• Methodology chapter: posting parts online
• Feed your blog to tOKo and see what comes out