Visual Epidemic

After filming this I got the idea to place the last article in the ‘arena’ of shared discourses being performed through, and differing by different communities of practice. The weblog affordances come in as an important discourse cycle of the ‘academic blogger’ discourse. I need to flesh out my thoughts more – I do have a few preliminary, scattered thoughts about the attributes the articles share and that feed into the red thread… this last article deals with specific discourse practices within a specific discourse community that change or are modified when mediated through the blog…. (still needs a bit more thought)…

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Calling all blog researchers! What would you make of this halo pattern? I am still working on the analysis, and actually what I have written below is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I have need to look closer at who the links actually represent and why the patterns are like they are… but this is what I have written ROUGHLY so far in my methodology section (at least the bits not in a notebook – still love pen/paper).

I am working on a discourse analysis of academic discourse within a scholarly blogging community of practice (will be an article). As I am in the middle of the analysis, you can expect a lot of this in the coming weeks ;-)

Description of the Academic Community of Practice
The community of practice examined in this article consists of 1,843 academic bloggers (represented by red nodes) connected by 2,758 links (as represented by yellow edges, or lines). As can be seen in the figures below, while these bloggers are connected through reciprocal linking practices, the bloggers still cluster in smaller groups who, upon closer examination, tend to blog about similar topics or blog in similar ways.

This community represents linked behaviors in the month of September, 2008. The community was snowball sampled from one academic blog and a ruby script was used to mine out all links from this blog for September, 2008. This list was then cleared of all non-blog links and the script was then applied to the list of bloggers generated from the first blog. This process was repeated for a total of three degrees away from the original blog. Links included in this analysis were gathered from the sidebar, as well as links from within the September posts.

The visualization of this community of practice illustrates interesting communicative patterns. As can be seen from the figure above, many of the blogs link back to a main blog. This is not the blog initially used to sample this community. The blog in question here is a filter-blogger in the community. That is, this blog filters news that is important to the community and because he is often ‘first’ in this community with news that is deemed important or interesting, he receives many links back from the bloggers of this community.

Another interesting pattern is the community’s ‘halo’. The blogs located in this halo are not as active as the core members. While not ‘lurkers’ in that they do participate in blogging, they do not participate as actively in discussions or share the same linking behaviors as the members located in the center. These halo-bloggers are very important to the makeup of the community of practice, however, as they engage in what Lave and Wenger would call legitimate peripheral participation.

Learning viewed as situated activity has its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skills requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.
Lave &Wenger (1997): 1

According to Lave and Wenger’s view of legitimate peripheral participation, negotiating legitimate peripheral participation can move a member in and out of the core, as well as allow for movement between different CofP’s, consequently allowing for differing phases of community development and information sharing (Haslam, 2001; Walker, Justesen, & Robinson, 2004). Likewise, Maria José Luzón’s (2009) study of the function of links in scholarly blogging found that links are used for a multiple reasons in academic blogs: “to seek their place in a disciplinary community, to engage in hypertext conversations for collaborative construction of knowledge, to organize information in the blog, to publicize their research, to enhance the blog’s visibility, and to optimize blog entries and the blog itself” (Luzón, 2009, p. 75).

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Let me start by saying, yes. I get it. I get this is supposed to be comic relief. BUT, it makes me question what we find is funny – and moreover, would we still find it funny if it were the other way around?

Now that I have piqued your curiosity, let me explain a bit more. I love the guild. I love their videos about the geeky, gaming community. But the video above really bothers me. The character Zaboo has his first girlfriend, and the incident here is a continuation of that storyline. Zaboo has always been portrayed as a ‘late blommer’ and with very low self-confidence (as have many of the Guild members). When he does get a girlfriend, described as a tall, hot violent-game player, he does and sacrifices everything for her wishes. While this is problematic in itself, at the end of this video you see Zaboo tied up in the closet after having forgotten to make breakfast for his girlfriend.

Codex is upset/angered by the situation, but still leaves without helping Zaboo. Yes, Zaboo’s situation is portrayed as ‘lucky’ – after all he is a geeky gamer who gets the hot girl. But if it were a woman tied up in the closet – no matter how hot the guy is – would this still be funny? Why is it funny that a man can be depicted as a victim of domestic violence as long as he is rewarded through kinky sex (this being part of the story line, as well)? Domestic violence is not funny – and the relationship as shown previously in this story is not funny. Yes, it is meant as comic relief to the Codex-enamored Zaboo, but the necessity falling into a bad relationship to get over unrequited love is not a healthy message.

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I have not posted here in a while because I have been working on the last bits of my thesis and as I originally created this space as a place to put my research on the visual (YouTube, PostSecret, etc) and my thesis being on linguistics and blogging, I have not really found a place for it here. However, I think I need to rethink this blog. Rather than limiting what type of research I put here, I think I will look at this as my research blog – for all my different areas of research. And I have several different areas!

On the theme of integration, I have also added a twitter plugin and a twitter fountain (a space where I am much more active these days). I hope that giving people the option to tweet my posts will create in me the drive to post more tweet-worthy bits.

SO! What am I working on now you ask?? Currently I am reading R. Scollon and S. Scollon’s book Nexus Analysis to get a better idea of how to structure an article. I was using Foucault’s author functions, but then decided that using yet another theory in an already SPRAWLY thesis would not be the smartest move. Instead I will do a discourse analysis on 6 academic blogs in order to try to answer the question of how academic discourse changes when performed through the blog platform. I have used mediated discourse analysis and nexus analysis in another book chapter where I looked at how pseudonymous blogging is received/perceived in the mass media (using BitchPhD and Belle de Jour’s blogs). The book is in press and I will blog a pre-print version when it comes out.

So here is to more blogging, to breaking down blog barriers (even if they were of my own creation), and to the integration of my fractured web identity. So dears, please tweet this ;-).

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I have been away now nearly a week and only have a few days left on my writing sabbatical. It has been a great trip so far and I really have gotten a lot of work done. Right now I have a last chapter and the intro to my thesis left. While the chapter is new, the intro has gone through so many different iterations, you would think I had multiple personalities – or rather that my research does. And I guess in a way my research does have multiple personalities. There were so many ways I could have gone with this thesis and I found myself dipping my toes into 6 different possibilities. But they all were too vague. It left the reader (and myself) feeling like I did not know what I was talking about. I have a new way of structuring everything that is complex, yet simple. I will post about it eventually, but for now I need to concentrate on the chapter I am currently working on. I am looking at using Foucault’s views on the author to redefine the discourse of the blogging author – specifically the academic/scholarly blogger. The aspect (there are 4) I will tackle tomorrow is his idea of that historically authorship was an act, but that modern authors are more a product.

‘Discourse was not originally a product, a thing… it was essentially an act – an act places in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane…historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership. (Foucault, XXXX, p. 108)

I will argue that scholarly blogging is a return to the historical view of authorship as an act, while also creating a product. I will use research logs and the blogging of the process rather than the final product (often a journal article or book chapter/book). I know I just glossed over this, but as this section is very much still in progress, I need to give it more thought. I will blog more about it in the days to come.

Tonight I also met with Ton and Elmine. They made a wonderful veggie lasagna and we discussed a program that visualizes complex datasets from user narratives. I can see so many uses for this program in our lab! I will write more about that too, but first I need to see if it is public (I think it is, but I just want to make sure).

(Here is a picture Elmine took from the after dinner discussion.)

So far the trip has been exactly what I needed to kick start this writing. I have also been able to take some time for running – and the more I run, the more I feel the connection between moving freely and thinking freely. The mind/body connection is so important, yet so easily de-prioritized.

More to come…

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On Thursday we had the 10 tactics for turning information into action screening and workshop. Between 20 and 25 people came to the new part of the lab on Thursday, settled into beanbags and chairs and watched as 10 tactics for turning infomation into action was examplified through case studies from around the world. The film, put together by the Tactical Technology Collective, was clear, pedagogical and current. After the workshop, I gave a short talk on two types of infoactivism – persistent campaigns (as were many of the examples in the film), and immediate/crisis campaigns (such as the SMS campaign for Haiti relief, or the use of Skype during Hurricane Katrina.

We then broke into groups and workshopped what we could do for a specific problem – namely the current problem of child trafficking in the aftermath of Haiti – and they came up with some interesting solutions beginnings. We discussed what we could do from here to set up helplines, how to raise money for building more orphanages, and the tech skills needed for setting up digital photobanks for missing and exploited children. We also discussed what could be done in Haiti such as branding (something like a blue cross or a red rose) to signal a ‘safe haven’ for children to go to when they can’t find their families.

We also talked about the personal implications of acting. We talked about former HUMlab seminar speaker Hoder who remains uncharged and unfairly imprisoned in Iran for actions dealing with his weblog. We talked about weighing personal decisions and an awareness of potential consequences. This is a sensitive subject – not least when you are passionate about your cause(s), but something that needs to be addressed, especially when giving a seminar to students.

After the seminar and workshop, attendees were invited to become part of a new group we are putting together called Academic Activism. We want to bring together technicians, artists, and theorists/academics to discuss infoactivist issues and see what we can do – not just theorize but actually affect.

(more to come on the group soon)

Here is a short film of the event

I also want to say a BIG THANKS to the Tactical Technology Collective for creating this film, their very generous distribution of materials – and for more importantly pushing for passionate activism.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | tags: 60posts, activism, HUMlab, social media, teaching. | #

I have a wish from a student in my Språkkonsult (Language Consultancy) course who wants to learn to build websites. I have been teaching them to use wordpress + tools to create an integrated (albeit fragmented) online web presence. I wonder if building a site, say from Dreamweaver, is a useful skill in a course that only goes three weeks and tries to cover a lot of ground? How useful are sites that are built outside of content management systems? Of course these sites are useful – but to give these students who are not online a lot of the time  a course in website building instead of the cultural and discourse/linguistic aspects of online tools (+ the popular, social media) seems to me to be the wrong way to go.  What do you think? Is there some kind of tool that will let the students build a presence online (it does not have to contain a blog), but that looks nice and contains relevant, professional information?

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I have an ethical dilemma in my research. I am looking at responses across platforms towards ‘secret sharers’ who share about domestic abuse on the Post Secret website. These postcards are anonymous, and are even published by only one person (although they are also often taken and put on facebook, other blogs and even flickr), so IP information and other identifying characteristics such as user names are hidden. The postcards are user-created, and often an analogue hodge-podge of images put together to create their desired message/secret. These secrets are often responded to in tweets, facebook comments, and on Post Secret’s own forum. What I am trying to work out is how to use (or not use) these images in my research – not least in future presentations of results. Permission to use the images is another matter, but what I am concerned with today is the potential harm that could come from using these pictures. You never know with these secrets if they are pictures of the abused, or stock photos, or download online, etc. There is, of course, a chance that these cards to depict the victim, and by using them in a presentation – even for the analysis of responses, not of the picture or secret itself – you may open the victim up to further abuse by ‘outing’ their secret. And yes, they are published online in a very popular weblog – but there is also a perception of anonymity, and by sending the card, the sender is agreeing to have them displayed on that site. So what is the ethically responsible thing to do? Describe the card, and do not use an image or screen capture (again, the permission to use the image is a different matter and must, of course, be received as well), or use the card as it is a published work? Difficult. I am leaning towards description, preferring to err on the side of caution – but would like to have a discussion about the ethics of this type of research.

1 Comment | In: Uncategorized | tags: 60posts, DVIS, ethics, postsecret. | #

I need some advice here.

I am starting a new article and I am looking at various sampling methods. The article will examine audience design over three different weblog communities of practice – an activist community, an academic community, and a knitting community. I have always used snowball sampling (half mined by a script, half by hand), but I wonder if that is not overkill for this much more qualitative article. For this article, I was thinking about using a stratified sampling method where I define the affordances/qualifications for the different communities of practice, then randomly pick 4-6 from each of the three groups. I thought about having both group and individual blogs, but actually having only individual blogs may give a clearer picture as it would eliminate more of the ‘talking amongst ourselves-ness’ of a group blog. Of course, that would have to be acknowledged in the article. The hypothesis of this article is that there are differences in the conceptualization and addressing of community members that are not accounted for by the affordances of the weblog tool – rather they are negotiated together with community members. So my question, dear readers, is about the validity of the sampling method. Can one make generalizations (even hedged ones) from such a small sample size?

1 Comment | In: Uncategorized | tags: 60posts, blogs, methods, weblogs. | #

Slow blogging, but much chapter writing – and that it important!

I am still working on this parkour chapter (deadline Friday). Tomorrow I will add the link analysis to the section describing the online space. But for now I will leave you with two reading suggestions and a little excerpt.

The Young and the Digital

Video Cultures: Media Technology and Everyday Creativity (esp the chapter on Self representation, identity, and visual style in a youth subculture).

and from the chapter-in-progress on value in digital remixing of parkour videos in opposition with valued aspects of parkour.

Swedish youth parkour films enact the identity of parkour runner through the skill portrayed in the run itself. Films by experienced parkour runners focus on the terminology of the tricks in the film’s description, or by enacting the tricks in a teaching/instructive capacity. Conversely, films by beginner runners often linguistically hedge the skill level in the description by labeling them ‘quickly made’ or ‘made when slippery outside’. Another marker of beginner versus more experienced parkour runners can be seen in the speed of the film. Less experienced runners, although possibly more experienced video editors, would slow down the motion of the trick and ask for commentary on the performance of the trick. One runner even entitled his video ‘What did I do wrong?’…

…Digital remixing in order to create videos which show the flow of the run, or a flow of tricks also proved to be an identifying marker of parkour runners. This is common both in amateur videos, but also in international, professionally made parkour YouTube videos. This is not to say that the Swedish youth are copying or mimicking international videos, rather that there seem to be implicit, agreed upon ways of editing together a video. Several informants in this case study termed these videos ‘flow films’, which may refer to a mediated edit of a central concept in parkour. Flow, in parkour, refers to the smoothness of transitions between moves. According to howtoparkour.net, the quality of the flow of a run is a marker of the runner’s skill. The videos, which used the term flow, were highly edited, thus it is unclear if the uploaders were referring to the flow between the edited tricks, or flow as a parkour aesthetic.

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