I am using Scollon and Scollon’s nexus analysis to examine the discourse of academic blogging. I use a 6 blogs in a close analysis. None of the information I use as examples is sensitive, but they all have a mixture of personal and work on their blogs. Also, I use specific language as examples, which could be googled. What do you think about the ethics of using names versus pseudonyms?
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)…
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).
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?
I have been looking for figures on the female to male ratio of the blogosphere today when working on an article edit about gendered language in a technology weblog community. I am looking at this more from a community of practice level, so in some sense it does not matter about the ratio of all blogs, rather the makeup of the specific community I am looking at. That being said, these numbers -widely publicized online – do produce a discourse which contributes to the legitimization of blogging language and behaviors. For example, in US authored blogs, most of the top 100 popularity lists (according to technorati) are male authored blogs. However, in Sweden, the most popular bloggers are women. Also according to Technorati’s 2009 report, The State of the Blogosphere, 67% of blog authors are male. Pew Internet, on the other hand, reports 57% of blog authors to be male. While it is ‘only’ a 10% difference, it also changes the overall picture of the blogosphere between one that is mainly male authored to one that is roughly equally authored by both male and females.
This is in no way a new debate, and my point is not to harp on the question of how these percentages are garnered (although that is an important issue), rather I want to underscore the differences in the gender makeup of the popularity indexes between US authored blogs and Swedish authored blogs. US authored blogs are dominated by male authors, while the Swedish blogs are dominated by female authors. When you look at the type of blogs that make up these lists, the US blogs are often news like. They report rather and comment. The Swedish blogs are dominated by a very young group of women who talk about fashion and pop culture (both Swedish culture and international) and are written in more of a diary style. This rough comparison aligns well with an older report by Herring et al which looks at style and genre between male and female authored blogs.
This is also interesting because it says very little about the ‘blogosphere’. The blogosphere is so very big that it has lost much of its meaning as a descriptive term. There is no blogosphere. There is a tool that is used in many ways and by many different communities of practice. A blog is a tool. Just as a newspaper is not journalism, a blog is not a genre of writing. It is a tool. Using blogs, authors report (journalism in various forms from professional to amateur), they collaborate, they publish novels and diaries and poetry, they converse, they share knowledge. But more importantly, through the affordances of the tool, blogs allow for communities to evolve around shared interestes and practices. They allow for conversation (even at a very low rate of occurrence) and collaboration that create a sense of community online. The tool is important, of course. In fact, language and identity within a blog is/must be performed through the affordances of the tool. And conventions which are not used in other forms of online writing, have become popular conventions in weblogs (like the strikethrough and the block quote and the ‘read more here’ link). So yes, affordances of the weblog do lead to certain conventions, but these conventions do not determine the blogosphere – it is what the bloggers DO with their blogs that make up a community. Moreover, these communities are no longer limited to bloggers. Linking between members using tweets and vlogs also allow for communities to be maintained online. Blogs do not a blogosphere (solely) make. It is the participation and the engagement between members that makes the community (the sphere). Not the tool.
This site is one researcher's wanderings through participatory media. Focusing on youth created media, I will use this blog to document my study of YouTube and related video hosting sites.
