Workflow… December 2, 2008
Posted by Sarah in Uncategorized.Tags: journler, research, software, workflow
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I’ve been collecting my ethnographic data for about 10 weeks now. I have to admit that I’m a bit behind… I have not looked at and analyzed every post on every blog I’m observing since the date I started observations. Conveniently for me, those posts generally don’t disappear.
Part of the delay has been developing a workflow. Because posts sometimes DO disappear, and so that I can do work if I happen to be offline (rare, but it has been known to happen), I am archiving the text of each blog post. Straight up copy/paste doesn’t work – it doesn’t capture images or links. Just viewing the source of the page doesn’t work – because it just gives you the framework of the page, not the post html itself.
My first tactic was to use the source viewer tab extension for Firefox and copy & paste from there into a local html file, which worked but I generally lost some formatting and getting it from there into my info management system – Journler* – was a multi-step process.
And then, about two weeks ago, a very smart person on the Journler support boards reminded me that I could drag a URL straight from my browser onto the Journler icon on the dock to create a shortcut to the post (which will open in Journler’s built-in browser) from which I can also easily create a reasonable local text copy.
Obviously this is a MUCH better workflow, but it means I need to go back and re-do a bunch of stuff.
Could I have figured this out sooner? Probably… but it’s not the end of the world and everything looks oh-so pretty and is oh-so easy to find & code now.
*It should be noted that I ADORE Journler. I use it for EVERYTHING – task management, receipts, webpages I need to read, anytime I need to dump any kind of text that I need to find again later. Highly recommended – but you have to be a person of superior intellect Mac user.
Just to prove that I really am working on it… October 28, 2008
Posted by Sarah in progress.Tags: academic, dissertation, research, sociology
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This is what I’ve been staring at all day. Well, permutations of this spreadsheet, anyway. These are my cleaned & coded data for the question about WHY survey respondents chose to categorize the blogosphere as public, private, both, or neither. I have it broken out by blogging service as well as numbers for all of the respondents. In case you’re more visually inclined, 63% of respondents classed it as “both”; 35% classed it as “public”, and 1% each said it was “private” or “neither”.
Don’t you feel smarter knowing that?
Striking a balance… September 22, 2008
Posted by Sarah in reflections.add a comment
One of my very favorite blogs, one I’ve been reading for probably 18 months or so now, is also one of the blogs that I’m observing for this second phase of my dissertation.
And I find I’m reading it differently now. Not that I’m analyzing the content as I read – I’ve always done that, because I honestly can’t read a personal blog WITHOUT doing a little analysis in my head. No, I find myself reticent to comment, treading carefully in my new research role. Whereas before I might have made a flip, suggestive joke, now I don’t. Why? Isn’t the point of participant observation to, you know, PARTICIPATE?
This is why it was definitely a good idea to not include anyone I actually know offline (or even have a significant online relationship with) in the ethnographic sample.
Coding Data September 19, 2008
Posted by Sarah in progress.Tags: coding data, data analysis, dissertation, progress
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I am slowly slogging through the coding of my survey data. It is TEDIOUS in the extreme (though… let me plug the Coding Analysis Toolkit from QDAP, which is a lovely web-based tool for coding data) but it is still a very time-consuming process (at best, 4 hours to code about 900 items).
One of the hardest things for me has been coming up with good codes. I mean, I know what I WANTED to get at with each question, but translating that into a reasonable set of codes (even allowing myself to choose multiple codes per unit) was sometimes an interesting process.
The question that has presented the greatest challenge has actually been the one in which I asked WHY people had categorized the blogosphere as a whole as public/private/both/neither. I THOUGHT I knew what I wanted to get out of that question and sat down and developed a set of 10 codes based on a combination of my conception of the question and a relatively shallow perusal of the respondent’s answers. When I started actually coding the data, though, I found myself shaking my head because the codes simply weren’t working… they weren’t lining up with what the respondents had said, and they certainly weren’t lining up with what I thought I wanted to get out of the question.
So I stopped, and I backed up. I sat here in my office with my eyes closed and really asked myself what I wanted to get out of that question. And I realized that I was trying to get at a LOT of things. Within that question, I’m really asking about broader issues of public and private (is the blogosphere by definition public? how does searchability play into that? etc.), about blogging practices (do bloggers use friends-lock or other technological means of controlling access, do they deliberately avoid certain topics, do they obfuscate their offline identity?), and about the goals of blogging (to communicate with others, to convey information, to gain an audience).
So, wow. That’s a lot of stuff from what I initially thought was a really simple question. Now, though, I think I have a better set of codes, ones that are much more in line both with what the respondents said and with what I want from those responses.
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from the data analysis process so far is just that. Be willing to back up and start over if something isn’t making sense. (Funny that I say the same thing to people who are impressed by my skills as a seamstress – “you just have to be willing to rip it out and start over if it isn’t working right.” Why hadn’t I thought to apply that advice to my dissertation?)
Interesting… September 3, 2008
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I am in the process of recruiting participants for the second phase of my data collection – a six-month participant observation. I’m recruiting people from three groups: big public (public blogs with large numbers of readers), small public (public blogs with small numbers of readers), and private (blogs that are access-restricted in some way). Until this afternoon, my positive response rate from people in the “private” group had been substantially higher than in any other group, which really seemed kind of odd to me. Right now my rates are looking like this:
Big Public
Contacted: 13
54% yes; 31% no; 15% ignoring me.
Small Public
Contacted: 17
47% yes, 24% no, 29% ignoring me.*
Private
43% yes, 7% no, 50% ignoring me.*
So the people who keep friends-locked LiveJournals are just ignoring me (assuming I’m a spammer, I presume), but if they answer me, they generally say yes. The “big public” folks are most likely to say both yes and no (neither of these is surprising – they are already accustomed to a big reading public, so what’s one more but also many of them are very busy with their blogging lives so taking on another commitment, no matter how small, is unlikely); the small public folks are kind of in the middle.
The really interesting thing is that until the set of invites I sent out today, the private folks were far and away the most likely to say yes.
*These are going to skew high right now, as I just sent out a whole batch of invitations to these folks this morning.
“How do you define the term blog?” July 11, 2008
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I’m in the middle of coding these data from my survey, and this is simply the best answer I have seen yet (2/3 of the way through the coding):
Blogging & Voyeurism July 3, 2008
Posted by Sarah in reflections.1 comment so far
I have a story I tell about how my dissertation developed. Way back when in 2002 I was thinking about blogs as identity tools. When I told people about the project, I noticed a HUGE generational split; people over the age of 40 thought that bloggers were exhibitionists and blog readers were voyeurs, while people under the age of about 25 were very nonchalant about the practice. (Obviously I’m generalizing; I know bloggers who are over 40 and I know people who are part of the “internet generation” who adamantly will not blog and will not read personal blogs.) It was this generational split that led me to begin looking at my actual topic, how bloggers are negotiating the public/private distinction.
I was recently reading Carolyn Miller & Dawn Shepherd’s 2004 article “Blogging as Social Action” and came across a very relevant quote addressing this question of voyeurism.
This brought me back to that very early thinking and I started wondering about WHY bloggers and blog readers don’t generally seem to be exhibitionists/voyeurs. I think the difference really lies in the “moral equals” angle – bloggers view each other more or less as equals, so there’s no possibility of their reading being a voyeuristic activity. Obviously there may be exceptions to this, but fundamentally I think bloggers and blog readers view their relationships as one of equals rather than one of unequal power.
“Weak” communities, ha! May 23, 2008
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I have a lot of other stuff I want to post about, but I have a great story to illustrate the strength of online communities.
I’m a moderator of a support-related listserv; last night one of our members found herself in all alone and in a very tough situation. And within a couple of hours of her posting, one of the other members of our list, who happens to live in the same area, was with her so she didn’t have to be all alone.
Examining my own prejudices… March 31, 2008
Posted by Sarah in Public and Private in the Blogosphere.Tags: assumptions, blogging, blogs, methods, research
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As I’m weeding through my survey data and thinking about which participants to recruit for the ethnographic phase of the project, I find that I have to examine some of my own assumptions. I’m sorting blogs into three categories: “large public” (large, probably fairly heterogeneous/unknown readership), “small public” (smaller, not entirely known readership), and “private” (folks who are using access controls and know exactly who their readership is – Friends Locked LJs, for example). And as I page through them, I find myself having to combat the assumption that LJs and blogs hosted at a commercial site (rather than having their own URL) are more likely to fall into the “small public” or “private” categories and, conversely, that those that aren’t blogging-service hosted are more likely to fall inot the “large public” category.
Dissertation by correspondence, with occasional F2F March 30, 2008
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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.
