February 2009 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Offering data, bibliography, discussion on corporate & institutional blogging
by Cornelius Puschmann 01 Feb '09

01 Feb '09

Dear colleagues, I have recently completed my PhD in English Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, with a dissertation on corporate blogging (full title: "The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication"). My focus was on linguistic pragmatics, but I would describe my work as strongly interdisciplinary. In the course of my research I have created a fully POS-tagged corpus (8 mio tokens) of company blog texts, most of them from U.S. companies. The corpus is stored in a MySQL database and could be exported to XML without serious difficulties. *Would any of you be interested in the dataset and perhaps in the bibliography that I have assembled? * In a nascent field such as blog research I believe that everyone benefits from sharing data. I'm also an advocate of the Open Access & Open Data movement ( http://www.berlin6.org/?page_id=73 ) and therefore a strong supporter of openly sharing research results. Not all of the corpus data was actually used in the thesis, largely because I focused more on theoretical issues in the end, but I think it could still be quite useful. In case you are interested in my findings, do not hesitate to contact me. If you are also looking into blogging, specifically in corporate or organizational contexts, do let me know so we can have a chat at IR 10. Best from Düsseldorf, Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann, M.A. Department of English Language and Linguistics / University of Düsseldorf, Germany University Library Center (hbz), Cologne, Germany +49 211 8115927 (office) +49 211 13956684 (home) +49 176 81178067 (mobile) www.elanguage.net

1 0

virtual ethnography/primary texts
by nativebuddha 01 Feb '09

01 Feb '09

so...back to maybe more traditional ethnography texts: Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (a how-to text) Hammersley and Atkinson (1995). Ethnography. London: Routledge. (both a concept and a practical methods text) Robben and Sluka (eds) (2007). Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. (a great collection of ethnographies, as well as essays about the the problems of ethnographic fieldwork) -robert

1 0

Re: [Air-L] virtual ethnography
by andrea baker 01 Feb '09

01 Feb '09

Manuel, hi-- What type of "maps" are you using? Do you mean drawings of connections between people, similar to what Moreno called "sociograms" or perhaps a more modern version developed by Valdis Krebs? Did you design your own system for mapping the relationships people described to you in words? Perhaps you are talking more about where and how people entered an online community and where they went next or how they created a shared space, as you call it. In any case, please let us know when your paper is available in English. It sounds fascinating. cheers, andee Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:51:35 +0100 From: manuel.boutet(a)free.fr Subject: Re: [Air-L] virtual ethnography To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <1233442295.4984d5f7d0718(a)imp.free.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Selon Pearse Stokes <pearsestokes(a)gmail.com>: > Further, if you consult recent articles that claim to perform virtual > 'ethnography' generally they perform 'participant observation' without > actually 'writing the culture' (the 'graphy' in ethnography). An example > would be boyd's 'Why Youth (heart) Social Networking sites' ... an > extended period of 'deep And for the most part virtual ethnography is > just interviews and qualitative analysis. Which isn't ethnography. About the "graphy" part of "virtual ethnography", i can't agree with your statement of impossibility. But i agree about the issue, and above all if you mean it literally, if by "graphy" you mean "visual". I see it as an open question today, a state of art, and our responsability to go further. For exemple, more than the quantitative / qualitative debate or articulation, it seems to me more fruitful to think about the role of museography when qualitative methods where created, and about the extended use by "ancient" anthroplogists of maps, plans, and other sketchs and drawings, as they were too in the "travel diary" tradition. For exemple, to achieve a better description of the ties in the Internet network - writing is very poor to account for their complexity; i found usefull to use some tools to map them. These maps were built to complement descriptions. It's a necessity, because, even when you describe precisely how participants find their way, without a map it's not clear for the reader how such "short views" (participants views are "shorts", they are "for practical matters") could build together a "shared space" or "social webspace". My point is, i really believe in virtual ethnography, because social sciences really need these accounts about the ways people not only "act" but find their ways out there. (Actually, i can send my recently publish paper about that very question, but in French. English conterparts are not ready yet.) Regards, Manuel Boutet Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CMH) http://www.cmh.ens.fr/ http://manuel.boutet.free.fr

2 1