I was back in WMass for a couple of days in order to meet with Bob. Very good, very productive meeting and I have a good plan in place to move forward with the next phase of the project.
No, it’s not the latest in traveling entertainment extravaganzas. It’s much, MUCH more exciting than that.
It’s my survey of bloggers. That’s right, the survey is officially live as of ten minutes or so ago. If you’re a “personal blogger”, please fill it out, and pass it on to your friends (copy & paste HTML below).
<a href=”http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=YWpihoh7RtF_2fL0QyOU8IjQ_3d_3d”>Bloggers, stand up and be counted! Take the “Public and Private in the Blogosphere” Survey!</a>
Found out yesterday that I was accepted for the doctoral colloquium at AoIR 8. So now I get to show off in public how I’m not that much further along than I was at Sussex 3 years ago. Joy?
Mark and I found out on Sunday that our paper, tentatively entitled “Space and Place: The New Playgrounds of 21st Century Life” has been accepted for AoIR 8.0. See folks in Vancouver!
I almost have a complete draft of my survey (hooray!)… As I’m writing it, I’m including “I don’t know” as an option for a number of questions. And I’m refraining from having “I don’t know” responses branch to a “HOW IN THE HELL CAN YOU NOT KNOW THAT???” page, though I am sometimes sorely tempted.
I’m working on my survey and the questions that I need to pose to the various blogging services. I had initially envisioned doing the blogging service e-mails at a later date, but I realized that I need to make sure that I have all my facts straight in writing the survey, so drafting those questions (and getting answers to them) has become priority. I’m tailoring the questions to the services, which means that some of the e-mails are more detailed than others - in particular, the MT/TypePad one is pretty skimpy. I should probably go see if there’s a free trial of TypePad or something so that I can muck about with it and formulate the questions better. (And because, really, all the Internet needs is ANOTHER abandoned blog from me. Seriously.)
When I posted yesteday afternoon, I was barely functional, having been up since 5, barely eaten (a breakfast sandiwch and a coffee at the airport, a ginger-ale and 2 bags of peanuts on my flight from BWI-BDL, a Luna bar and a diet coke, and a small bag of Raisinets), and done the defense. Now I’ve had food and sleep and the company of good friends, and I can say more about the academic bits, mostly in list form. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been given official blessing to go forth and research and then write a dissertation.
Whoo?
(Am also planning a paper for AoIR with my friend Mark, which is almost more exciting than passing the proposal defense.)
Friday, 15 December, 2006, 12:30 PM. Location TBD.
I’ve never written a complex survey before. I think I’ve written a max of three or four surveys in my life. So when I sat down today to turn my little LiveJournal pilot survey into the beginings of something bigger, with skip logic and all that stuff, I felt a bit daunted. I didn’t even know where to begin. I knew I needed some way to map out the skip logic (of which there will be a fair bit, assuming that SurveyMonkey doesn’t limit it) and I knew that ideally I would be able to incorporate both the map of the skip logic and the full questions (prompts and answers) into one document.
I started messing around with ways that I could do it in OmniOutliner. I’d used the app for outlining drafts of my prospectus and other general mucking about, but had never tried to use the multiple columns feature. It occurred to me that I might be able to have a single many-columned document that could serve as the entire map. It turns out that secondary columns don’t have all the features of the primary column (or at least I couldn’t figure out how to force it to do that), but I created two documents: one for the main survey and one for the subsections. Of course, it just now occurred to me that I could just as easily have one document with the subsections below the main section, and in just a minute I’m going to go collapse the two documents into one master one because that makes SO MUCH more sense. So now I’ve translated the old pilot survey into a main survey and a branch for LiveJournal users. I need to start working on lists of questions for users of other blogging systems and revamp the whole thing to make more sense for what I’m thinking about now (as opposed to two years ago).
In other news, 3/4 of my committee is ready for me to defend my proposal. Whoo!
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