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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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?

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