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 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…
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?
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.
