Breaking down isolation is also how I have described the usefulness of blogging for PhD students in the past. When they are full time candidates, these students are quite often in a liminal space that is suspended from clear identity markers, they crave a sense of being part of something wider. That is, something more collegial and intellectual than the way that cash-strapped university departments tend to interpret their obligations to providing a ‘postgraduate experience’ (providing an email address, a hot-desk, and seminars on how to get published).

Would you mind if we showed your blogs during the session?

On the third point:

Like Sarah I use blogs for research notes and musing - some of which I don’t publish - and of course the core data of my project (investigating PhD process) is being captured by blogging candidates in both their posts and their comments.

I think that blogs can also support the research process by creating shared space for both notes and rough ideas, and for the kind of musing and brainstorming that people in a research team might do when they were in the same room. You have to be prepared to commit yourself to writing your thoughts down instead of musing out loud, but if people can get to the point of allowing themselves to ‘muse onscreen’ (scarey - your muddled thinking exposed and preserved!) I think they can be really valuable. My partner is trying to get them established within research teams that include both academic and clinical nurses (some shiftworkers) in distant locations. It is hard to convince people that it’s worth the time to read and write, but they are beginning to see that it saves them the time of trying to organise and attend meetings.

Them’s my thoughts for now… I really really wish I could be at your session - it looks like the most interesting at the conference to me. Good luck with it.

And congrats on the Pandora. Deserved, and extra good if it makes you blog more often!

The assumption that info capital rich young adults are the norm of ‘yoof culture’ is an interesting one to me. Especially re: generalisations about equitable access based on stats about internet access alone, rather than differing patterns of use.

Sarah’s comments make me wonder about disciplinarity as a factor in what kinds of blog-related research might be considered acceptable. So, to what extent is blogging considered useful for research when it’s in a newer, more experimental or creative discipline, compared with more traditional disciplines (say, like Literature or Philosophy?) I guess there I’m also wondering about the way that some senior academics seem to think that blogging is a waste of time and that students should focus their time on their thesis/ job-oriented scholarly publications. But then you have someone like Henry Jenkins…

I am particularly interested in something in between ‘researching blogging and blogging research’, or perhaps it is something encompassing both, I am looking at blogs (and the wider live-web) *as* research.

At the moment I am using my blog as a research tool (I am a doctor of creative arts candidate) in the same way a fine arts researcher would use a reflective (paper) journal. I use it kind of like a sketch/scrap book to hold and work though ideas and also as a place to keep notes on my progress. Because it is online it becomes something more than a reflective journal though, it gives me the opportunity to link to inspirations and ideas, and also provides the opportunity for me to get real time feedback.

For the practical component of my research I will also be using a (different) blog to discuss and disseminate live-web art projects, but as well as a place to catalog and distribute the individual art works I see the blog itself as a kind of art/research experiment.