Following up the conversation...
Liz had tried to post this as a comment to my previous post,
but the formatting was a little messed up - so I'm posting her
note her in the original format so that the content is a bit more readable.
From ell@mail.isc.rit.edu Thu Jul 1 09:01:11 2004
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 15:33:44 -0400
From: Elizabeth Lawley
To: elijah wright
Subject: Re: re many2many post on blog research
Elijah-
Thanks for your note.
On Jun 28, 2004, at 8:25 PM, elijah wright wrote:
> 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.
You're right that most were qualitative in nature--though Cam Marlow's
was explicitly quantitative, based on his blogdex data. While I'm not
at all against quantitative approaches, I think it's more difficult to
apply them usefully before we understand the nature of what we're
studying--and I don't think most of us do at this point. Qualitative
research allows us to identify the characteristics and variables, while
quantitative allows us then to measure and test them. And on a macro
level, quantitative data is allowing us to make out the contours of the
landscape--Cam's work is one example
(http://overstated.net/04/05/24-weblogs-and-authority.asp), while the
work they're doing at Technorati is useful as well
(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4411).
> 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.
Point well taken. To be fair, a lot of that has taken place on the
weblogs of those scholars--when Alex, or Thomas, or Cam post about what
they're working on, they tend to get comments and pushback from their
readers. But it's true there could be more.
> 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 find that a troubling approach. I'm not "one first, the other
second," nor would I characterize others in that way. No more than I'd
say I was "woman first, scholar second," or "American first, scholar
second." (And in the former example, I think that it's also true that
women writing about gender issues tend to have a little more
credibility in that space, and that men writing about gender issues
have to work a little harder to prove that they're genuinely attuned to
and aware of the issues.)
My concern is that trying to describe, categorize, measure, or analyze
something that you haven't spent a good bit of time "within" is, to me,
problematic. It's like trying to do cultural studies without actually
spending some time in the culture you're studying.
> 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.
Actually, my critique was based on what I saw as flawed methodology and
problematic solutions, which I then attributed to lack of experience
with the medium. Trying to characterize several million weblogs
worldwide (technorati currently tracks 2.8 million) based on two small
samples, is, I still believe, not a viable approach.
> 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.)
There were a number of weblog-related presentations at AoIR--it wasn't
just yours I was referring to. However, if you'd presented as a part of
Alex's panel, I suspect I would have had the same reactions. It wasn't
an issue of being "inside the circle."
> 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'm not dismissing them, and I agree that they're valuable tools. But I
think they can only successfully be applied once we have a better
understanding of what the genre (or genres) we're looking at are. A
random sampling that excluded sites based on controversial criteria
(excluding livejournal, for example), or categorizes them based on only
two weeks of posts (in any given two-week period it would be easy to
categorize my blog in a way that would not be representative of it over
the longer time frame) is not, I think, a good starting point for
content analysis.
> 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'm not just talking about ethnography. I'm talking about fundamental
misunderstandings of the medium caused by overly superficial
assessments. I only mentioned ethnography as one of five aspects of
blog research that I think have some potential for exploration. But
just as it's difficult to do literary theory if you don't read
literature, and difficult to do meaningful analyses of Japanese culture
if you haven't spent some time in Japan, and difficult to do accurate
assessments of computer use if you don't know the terminology
associated with computers, I think it's very difficult to do research
into blogs without a solid understanding of the form, one that's
particularly difficult to obtain from the outside looking in. Not
impossible, certainly. But as I said above, the issue was what I saw as
problems with the methodology and conclusions, which I simply inferred
were based on misunderstandings born of unfamiliarity.
> And, as far as I can tell, no one has suggested doing so.
Perhaps not. But generalizations based on random samples that do not
acknowledge the differing impacts of weblogs on the communities within
which they function seem to me to be generalizing. Kevin Marks of
Technorati has made an interesting point, which is that the
most-linked-to weblogs still have only thousands of inbound links, a
miniscule fraction of the total number of blogs. There really isn't "an
A-List," outside of specific areas. There's a political "A-List," a
techno-geek "A-List," etc. But if you were to ask the vast majority of
weblog readers and writers to name ten blogs out of the top 100, the
vast majority couldn't do it. The impact of blogs on readers happens in
smaller, interactive circles, not mass media broadcast modes.
I do wish you'd posted your questions and challenges as a comment to
the blog entry, so that more people could participate in this
conversation; maybe you'd consider doing that at some point? Or posting
it to your blogninja site so that I could point to it? I've found that
open conversations on blogs tend to facilitate interesting emergent
ideas, as well as providing an opportunity for serendipitous additions
of ideas from people we might not have thought to ask.
Like you, I'm hoping that there can be some collaboration and
cooperation among researchers in this space. That was my primary goal
in posting what I did...to create a public discussion of blog research
issues that would spark some discussion.
And I do apologize if you found what I wrote disrespectful--it
certainly wasn't intended as such.
best,
Liz
.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-.
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Ph.D.
Assoc. Professor - RIT/Info Tech
site: http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/
blog: http://mamamusings.net/
.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.-.
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