An email correspondence with Liz Lawley

Posting this here by request of Liz Lawley - our intention is to convert a bit of email correspondence we've been having into public discourse, open to debate and discussion. We'll see how this goes - I'm not at all sure how many people are going to want to discuss, debate, or even think through these things. If you're into it, feel free to participate through either trackbacks, comments, or another mechanism of your choice.

From elw@stderr.org Tue Jun 29 22:18:34 2004
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 19:25:25 -0500 (CDT)
From: elijah wright 
To: ell@mail.rit.edu
Cc: brog@blogninja.com
Subject: re many2many post on blog research


Hi Liz.

I just finished reading your recent (June 24) Many2Many post on 'blog
research issues'.

I'd like to open a bit of direct dialogue with you - hopefully as a means
of eliciting ways and channels through which we (you, me, others) can cooperate
or coordinate our weblog research efforts.

As a frame for this conversation, I think it is important to keep
in mind that different disciplines and different speakers have
disparate motives and goals when they prep conference presentations.  The
old battles between qualitative and quantitative methods, among others,
seem to be alive and well among weblog researchers.  I'd like to see that
change, and see everyone become more respectful of the work that
others are doing with regard to weblogs.

I found these first few paragraphs from your post particularly
compelling, and would like to spend a few lines expanding (I'd usually
call it "exploding", but that has negative connotations I don't feel are
appropriate here...) a few of the comments already made.


"My first experience with listening to an academic take on blogs was at
AoIR in Toronto last October, where Alex had put together a wonderful
panel on weblogs. The first set of speakers included Alex, Cameron Marlow
(of Blogdex fame), Matthew Rothenberg, and Thomas Burg -- academic
bloggers, all. They had some wonderful insights into weblogs, and they
left me feeling very excited about the potential for interesting research
in this space."


I was happy to see this work being presented, as well, though not so
uniformly as you seem to have been.  As a gloss of what I saw happening in
that panel - I'd probably categorize most of it as qualitative and mildly
sociological.  Alex's presentation was explicitly so, while others (Thomas
Burg) tended toward an approach grounded in critical theory that is
somewhat less common among AoIR-ites.

My notion of what ought to be going on, here - and i think this is a key
practice that needs attention from the blog-scholarship group as a whole -
is that more energy should spent on critique and commentary when our
friends, or people that we agree with, are the ones talking.


"Unfortunately, that initial glow faded fast--the rest of the
presentations related to blogs that I saw at AoIR were given by people who
had little or no personal experience with blogs, and who were clearly
unfamiliar with the nuances of the form,"


I would probably not have mentioned this, were I you, but it does raise an
interesting axis of discussion that cries out for attention:  how can we
better integrate what I'll call "experience papers" (scholarly papers
written by folks who define themselves publicly as bloggers first, and
academics second) with papers that are written by people who identify as
"scholar first, blogger second or not at all"?

I'm not sure that it is fair to critique panel presentations based
on the presenter's apparent experience (or lack thereof) with weblogs;
essentially, you are forced to rely on your perceptions of their knowledge
rather than their *actual* knowledge.

We didn't participate in Alex's mega-blog-panels at AoIR because our work
simply *didn't fit* with what was being done in the panels. I'm not sure
how we (other presenters) should take your critique, actually, or even
whether you're talking about us.  (I suspect so, based on what our core
material was.)


"This most often manifested itself as a tendency to lump all blogs
together as a single formas I pointed out in our MEA panel, thats about as
useful as trying to lump all books together as a single form. Sure, you
can make some general observations about booksthey tend to be made out of
paper, to have page numbers, to have a cover and a title page, etc. But
those descriptive elements are hardly the stuff that interesting and
useful analysis is made of."

So where do content analytic paradigms and genre analysis fit into all of
this?  They're canonical research tools and can't easily be dismissed.


"I had an overwhelming sense of blogger as other in the presentations at
AoIR, which was echoed at the MS symposium I attended. Theres some value,
of course, to an outside perspective on the culture of blogging and
bloggersthat kind of ethnography is done all the time in social science
research. But when anthropologists and sociologists study a foreign
culture, they generally make a significant effort to understand their
subjects -- not just to take a series of snapshots from afar, but to live
amongst them, participate in their daily activities, observe the cycles
and rhythms and rituals of their lives, and identify the differences as
well as the commonalities. I havent seen that same level of immersion in
the blog studies that have emerged thus far."


Not everyone is an ethnographer, nor should we all attempt to be.  For
that matter, desires that everyone be deeply immersed in the activity of
blogging compromise the community by removing objectivity and empirical
research from the realm of possibility.


"I dont think it makes sense to lump all research and observation about
blogs together under one rubric."

Of course not.

And, as far as I can tell, no one has suggested doing so.


--elijah wright
Indiana University, Bloomington
School of Library and Information Science

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