At last an edited collection of articles about different aspects of digital storytelling has arrived at Amazon US and on the publisher’s site, Peter Lang (it will doubtless be available at Amazon UK soon).

Table of contents follows:
Knut Lundby: Introduction: Digital storytelling, mediatized stories
Ola Erstad/James V. Wertsch: Tales of mediation: Narrative and digital media as cultural tools
Nick Couldry: Digital storytelling, media research and democracy: Conceptual choices and alternative futures
Kirsten Drotner: Boundaries and bridges: Digital storytelling in education studies and media studies
Nancy Thumim: ‘It’s good for them to know my story’: Cultural mediation as tension
Birgit Hertzberg Kaare/Knut Lundby: Mediatized lives: Autobiography and assumed authenticity in digital storytelling
Mark Evan Nelson/Glynda A. Hull: Self-presentation through multimedia: A Bakhtinian perspective on digital storytelling
Kelly McWilliam: Digital storytelling as a ‘discursively ordered domain’
Lotte Nyboe/Kirsten Drotner: Identity, aesthetics, and digital narration
Larry Friedlander: Narrative strategies in a digital age: Authorship and authority
John Hartley: Problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media
Ola Erstad/Kenneth Silseth: Agency in digital storytelling: Challenging the educational context
Elisabeth Staksrud: Fairytale parenting: Contextual factors influencing children’s online self-representation
David Gauntlett: Creative brainwork: Building metaphors of identity for social science research
Tone Bratteteig: Does it matter that it is digital?
David Brake: Shaping the ‘me’ in MySpace: The framing of profiles on a social network site.

Comments on the book would be welcome - particularly on the last chapter mentioned which is my own!

I am re-visiting my literature review for my blogging-related thesis and I would like to make sure I have not missed anything important. I have uploaded my weblog-related references to citeulike here. I am particularly interested in qualitative approaches to blogging - especially interview-based work and in the study of personal/journal weblogs - sometimes dubbed “lifelogs” (as opposed to the study of weblogging for political, marketing or educational purposes). There seem to be very few such studies - those I have found I have pasted below.

So can anyone point me to important sources I have missed?

Update: I tried to do this using Citeulike but its importing from Endnote appears to leave something to be desired, so please comment here with your citations instead. I have pasted what I have found so far in the way of interviews with personal webloggers below (Thanks Lori for reminding of your contributions!).

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Robin Hamman pointed me to some interesting research into global adoption of online “Social Media” by a PR firm, Universal McCann. On the good side, the research is longitudinal (this is the third wave of research, which started in 2006). It also covers Internet users in 29 countries - more breadth than most studies. But it also clearly needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The methodology is not clear but it looks like people were recruited to fill out online surveys of their usage (how were they found? To what extent were they self-selected?). They also chose a rather special target group - people who use the internet every day or every other day and are between 16 and 54 years old - a group they call the “active Internet universe”.

Having selected this unusually “net savvy” group they then find, unsurprisingly, a higher rate of adoption of social media/web 2.0 applications than the phone and face to face interview-based surveys I am familiar with. For example, 25.3% of the McCann UK sample had (at some point) started their own weblog - this compares to the Oxford Internet Institute’s 2007 figure of 9% of Internet users having maintained their own weblog in the last year. And while it is interesting to know that 70.3% of the Chinese “active Internet universe” had started a blog at some point you have to bear in mind (as they themselves point out) that “emerging Internet markets tend to have a demographical profile that fits the early adopter” (on slide 22 you see that in China only 6.4% of all 16-54 year olds fit their “active Internet universe” profile).

Given the limitations of the data outlined, it is hard to justify the kind of sweeping statements that are then made about the significance of social media eg “Over time, all users increase the regularity of usage. Eventually everybody will be an active user, as they have been with television.” (slide 7) or “The blogosphere is now so large it is an accurate barometer of consumer opinion” (slide 33). But if you avoid the hype you may be able to find some info-nuggets…

I saw a new link labelled “share your story” under my name in Twitter. I thought “hmmm - is Twitter trying to get into the blogging arena with a space for longer-form entries or is it trying to set up a profile page for each user?” So I click on it and I find they want my age, gender and location and why I use Twitter. It’s a marketing survey! Not what I think of as “my story” - guess my interest in digital storytelling skews my perspective on such matters…

I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.

The BBC has launched BBC Memoryshare
“A living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day.” They suggest that what is provided “may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC.”

According to this NY Times article about Twitter, “90 percent of users agree to have all their posts available to the public”. This is all the more baffling considering that twitter now allows any user to be alerted in real time about anyone who mentions any string publicly. Public blogging I can understand but isn’t microblogging about the kind of hour by hour minutiae that only your friends will be interested in?

David Brake

To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a mainstream UK TV series about a personal weblogger until now. Does the first screen outing have to be for ‘Belle Du Jour‘ - on TV as The Secret Diary of a Call Girl?

David Brake

Just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight two very useful resources danah boyd has recently brought to my attention via her blog.

First is a presentation (available in audio and video though not alas transcribed) by her and three other US leaders in the study of online risks for young people - David Finkelhor, Michele Ybara and Amanda Lenhart. I was surprised as she was about how much their conclusions (particularly those of Finkelhor and Ybara) seem to have been misrepresented by the media. They do an excellent job of separating the hype about online dangers from the realities and the remedies they suggest for educators and for parents (and their criticisms of current thinking) seem to me very well thought through and argued.

danah mentioned an idea which I hadn’t seen promoted before - “digital street outreach” - the idea that peers online would intervene when they see behaviour or profiles that suggest the author is having trouble. I had thought the Cyber Angels might be doing this kind of work but it seems their focus is now on schools and parents not on the troubled kids themselves.

On a similar theme, but with more qualitative detail, I recommend a paper of danah’s she recently published online both as text and as audio - “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”. It was very broad-ranging and gives an excellent introduction to some of the issues around young people’s use of social networking software.

The excellent academic group weblog Crooked Timber has produced a kind of online seminar via their weblog about Yochai Benkler’s recent book The Wealth of Networks which has attracted much attention in the blogosphere and contends that the Internet has enabled a new model for producing public goods which is under threat from corporations and governments.

The seminar happened back in May ‘06 so you won’t be able to join the discussion there any more but the archives are still available and worth reading. And if you want to comment further Benkler’s book is - appropriately - online and in wiki form.

David Brake