Archiving, blogging and research
Posted on | September 24, 2007 |
On Friday Home Cooked Theory was approached by the State Library of Queensland to be included as part of the National Library’s Pandora archive. This means the blog will now be available for the public to access in years to come. I feel incredibly humbled by this, and even more motivated to keep blogging in tandem with my research. Hopefully it won’t stop those of you who have been lurking for the past three a half years to say hi and leave a comment. In fact maybe it will provide a new incentive!
Coincidentally, the request came the day after I gave a talk to 140 of the university’s closest industry “friends” about online intimacy and social networking. A lot of people in the audience seemed both surprised and interested in the dynamics I was talking about and also enthusiastic that research of this kind might help them in various ways. The State Librarian sitting at my table had some very hard questions afterwards, including what libraries should be doing about things like Facebook, and whether their role should involve documenting how these sites are being used. To me, anything would be more fitting in today’s inequitable information environment than the current pressure to provide the physical space and bandwidth to allow chatting, status updates and video downloads for rich kids who can afford to go to uni and therefore could do the same things at home. But as these tetchy comments only indicate, currently I have no good answers to any of these questions, though I’m certainly interested in exploring them.
Something else happening this week is the Australian Blogging Conference at QUT where I will be joining Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess in a session on “Researching Blogging and Blogging Research”. Our panel is scheduled at the same time as the politics and creative commons sessions, so I figure we’ll be struggling to get an audience. Then again maybe a few people will be just as tired as I am with the chauvinism of the journalists vs bloggers wars and trickle into our room.
This conference is being organised under the presumption that ‘everyone is a journalist and therefore everyone is on the record’. In some ways this makes me quite nervous, especially because my most enjoyable conference experiences tend to happen in the margins and often the local pubs surrounding the formal discussion. But the upside is that precisely because the conference remit is that participants will know as much about the topics as the session leaders, we are being encouraged to experiment with alternative forms of dialogue.
In this vein I thought it appropriate to invite those of you who can’t make it to Brisbane to offer your own thoughts on the topics covered in our session so that I can then report back. The initial questions we’re asking are:
* What’s there to research about blogging?
* What research methodologies can be used to research blogging?
* How do blogs support the research process?
* How do blogs contribute to disseminating research?
In the past, I’ve written a bit in response to the first question, and I think Axel’s got some of the best ideas about the second, so I’m especially keen to hear from those of you who have experience to share on the last two. But please leave a comment any kind by Friday if you’d like to be involved.
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8 Responses to “Archiving, blogging and research”
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September 24th, 2007 @ 8:49 pm
Hello, I will actually be there on Friday, but I thought I would offer some thoughts in advance anyway, since the last two questions are probably more where my experience comes from
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.
September 24th, 2007 @ 9:59 pm
Congrats Mel on making it into Pandora. I love the very idea of that archive. And also on your award that you posted about, which (I just now realise) I only commented on congratulatingly in my head.
September 26th, 2007 @ 12:20 pm
Thanks Laura! Lots to celebrate, yes. Pandora totally appeals to my inner geek.
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…
September 26th, 2007 @ 1:05 pm
Congrats on the Pandora inclusion.
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.
September 26th, 2007 @ 7:08 pm
Argh! I didn’t book for this conference because I thought I’d be in the States by now. Plans went awry and now I’m not leaving for two weeks. But too late to organise getting to Bris - I lost money in the plan-awry-event, so couldn’t even afford to fly up for the day.
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!
September 27th, 2007 @ 9:41 am
M-H, absolutely agree: that’s such a great point about the benefits of blogging to ease feelings of remote-ness… and I think your partner is really onto something that these benefits could be shared in a much wider range of workplace environments.
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?
September 27th, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
You mean the blogs in the study? Email me (I seem to have lost your email address…) mhward@bigpond.net.au and I’ll give you the address. Also some more info about how I’m using my own blogs in writing my own thesis.
September 27th, 2007 @ 7:16 pm
Never mind; I found you.