If you are writing with a word count in mind you should know about something which I just discovered - the word count in Word seems to consistently count more words in your document when it has field codes in than when you strip them out. I just tested this on a document which (according to Word) contained 7179 words before field codes were stripped, 6,473 without (the document had 690 words of bibliography in it). I assume that the latter figure is the correct one. (Note: I am using Endnote 10 on a Mac with Office 2004 - different versions of either application might give different results). It’s worth checking with your own documents before sending them to an editor!

David Brake

I thought I would look up the stats on weblog production in the US to see whether they appear to justify the conventional wisdom that blogging continues to increase in popularity. Well it turns out that the picture according to Pew Internet’s longitudinal data don’t appear to back that point of view - in fact, the graph of American Internet users having ‘ever created a weblog or ‘blog’” appears to peak in Jan 05 at 10% and decline to between 7 and 9% since. In principle of course the number who have ever created a blog can only rise. But the survey has a precision of +-3% so almost all of the variation is within that range. The best we can therefore say is that in January 2005 between 7 and 13% of Americans had created a weblog and by April 2006 that number had likely not changed much (the range being between 5 and 11% at that point - though the question asked had slightly changed).

 David Brake

A while back I wrote about Questionpro as part of a posting about tools academics might find useful and (on my personal blog) as part of a roundup of online questionnaire tools. They do indeed have lots of features and a free academic trial but be warned - if you need to go back to the survey you used after the six month trial is over - even just to get at your existing data - you’ll have to pay. Not only that but you’ll have to give them your credit card details and agree to monthly payments (at least $15) which you will then have to remember to cancel when you’ve got what you need.

Admittedly all of this is documented on their site but it’s still annoying that they couldn’t cut me some slack to get at my data.

I hope someone out there can tell me of a service which is web-based, hosted, reasonably powerful and free for unlimited academic use…
David Brake

Sonia Livingstone has asked me to pass this on. Please respond to her directly (as below) but it would be interesting if you could share your favourite new media papers here in the comments as well (and comment on my choices - at the bottom - if you wish):

My colleague Leah Lievrouw and I have been asked to develop and edit a major compilation of “classic” must-read articles in new media studies - a sort of “desert island” collection that will be published as a (rather hefty) four-volume reference.

Leah and I have made our own preliminary list. However, our experience with the Handbook of New Media has taught us that this field is a very big umbrella, covering everything from media law and regulation, to studies of communities and social networks, to education and the workplace, to digital arts and culture (and more). The challenge is to assemble a collection that fairly and comprehensively covers the field as we specialists understand it.

So, we are seeking your help! We’d love you to tell us about up to three nominations for journal or proceedings articles, key book chapters, or other publications of similar length that you would consider essential reads for anyone wanting to know what new media studies (broadly construed) is about.

These might be readings you always assign to students, items you consistently cite in your own work, or pieces that have made a difference in the way you think about and study new media yourself. We are particularly interested in items that have historical value, tend to be overlooked, or concisely capture a writer’s most important ideas. We’re also keen to make this an international list, since this is an international field. You may suggest your own publications, BUT we are more interested to know what or who has influenced you.

Leah and I will select the final list for the collection, but we will be happy to summarize and share everyone’s nominees after we get feedback, which itself should be a very interesting resource. We’d like your suggestions and ideas by October 1 if possible - we’re also eager to see if this exercise generates any discussion!

Thanks very much for your time and interest!

Sonia Livingstone - please reply to s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

For myself (David Brake) I must admit I haven’t been as conscientious as I could be in keeping track of which papers and books I have found most useful or thought provoking but here are three that I thought were excellent and which others might not have run across:

Browne, K. D. and C. Hamilton-Giachritsis (2005) “The Influence of Violent Media on Children and Adolescents: A Public-Health Approach“, Lancet, 365 pp. 702-710.
A clear and concise overview of the extensive scientific debate on this contentious issue.
Bruckman, A. (2001) “Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet”. in Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiries, Lancaster, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html

Nuanced discussion of different ways of ethically treating people whose texts and other works appear online ranging from full disclosure of their identities to complete concealment.

Crawford, A. (2002) “The Myth of the Unmarked Speaker” in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, (Elmer, G. ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 89-104.
An excellent and thoughtful debunking of the notion that text-based Internet communication eliminates status differentials because of the lack of visual or verbal cues.

A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:

• Netvouz, a more feature-packed way to share and store bookmarks than any of the others I have looked at including del.icio.us - my collection now numbers 6540 - the public version is here and my collection of bookmarks tagged “academic” may be worth browsing.
• Scopus from Elsevier is a better journal searching tool than Web of Knowledge with a much easier to use interface (though you need a subscription to be able to use either)
• A9 from Amazon is a handy way to access the ‘read inside the book’ features offered by Amazon with fewer clicks.
• I find Bloglines’ search seems to find links to blogs on a given subject area that other blog search engines miss but in truth I haven’t experimented extensively with the wide range of blog search tools available.
• I did the survey that formed part of my thesis work using QuestionPro which has lots of handy features and offers academics one free unlimited use survey (though eventually your access to the results will expire so don’t forget to download them to SPSS!).
• Go Digital and other “techtalk” podcasts (see the podcast section of the extensive resources along the right side of my personal blog). Primarily because they enable me to keep up with the tech news including blog-related stuff while I am doing the dishes or cycling around town rather than reading until my eyeballs bleed (though actually I do both!).
• On that resources list you will also find a number of free PC software tools like anti-virus software and a link to a blog posting I made, gathering all the useful cheap and free Mac software I use (academic and otherwise).
• Update: If you want to manage your thesis like you would a business project, you could use a web based project management tool like Basecamp or open source software like GanttProject 2
• Not strictly a research tool but something absolutely necessary to the future of my research nonetheless - Synk - a piece of Mac software which helps me back my entire hard drive to a separate drive which I keep at the LSE so if our flat burns to the ground with my laptop in it I will still have a thesis to complete!

I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…

Be particularly careful when using computer software that lets you move or delete whole files at a time - Windows Explorer and the Mac Finder certainly but also programs like NVivo (or Microsoft Office) that have file deletion features built in. Don’t ignore the warning dialogue boxes that come up when making changes or deletions and - particularly - be careful if you take your eyes off the screen when you are typing. I was typing in NVivo, I looked down at my transcript and somehow I must have typed a sequence of keys that deleted one of my interview transcripts and confirmed it because that transcript vanished! The only way I could think to get it back was to revert to what I had saved earlier.

Update: It happened again - and this time I think I know why. If you are working in NVivo on a transcript and type control-D (right beside control-F which is "find") you will delete that document! And there is no ‘undo’!! That’s a feature they are adding in NVivo 7, coming up shortly. And not a minute too soon…

You are backing up your fieldwork and documents regularly, right? To a separate hard disk or removable disk? And preferably taking that backup to a location far away from where your primary work machine is (in case of fire, flood etc)? Data disasters do happen, and it costs very little to protect yourself from them these days.

According to a recent study in the December issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is summarised here:

people overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone?be it sarcastic, serious or funny?when they send an e-mail, as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them.

So be careful out there!

Variation in English Words and Phrases (VIEW) is a search engine for the British National Corpus of words. Among its many functions it lets you find out the kinds of words that are frequently associated with other words. The adjective most commonly found with "nerd" is "computer", for example. Unfortunately, it is a corpus of late 20th century words and does not contain the words that would be most interesting to me - "blog" or "blogger". It also turns out if you go to Google.com and type "define:yourword" it will offer you "related phrases" (the related phrase for "blogger" was "Baghdad Blogger".

The Chronicle alerts me to the work of Joseph R Ferrari, who has co-written a volume, “Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings“. To my astonishment our library doesn’t have it yet (but I’ve put in a request). If you are interested there’s an online discussion with Ferrari starting 14:30 EST today.

I can’t resist a quote from near the bottom of the Chronicle’s article:

Karem Diaz, a professor of psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, has studied the behavior among Peruvians, whose expectations of timeliness tend to differ from those of Americans.

"In Peru we talk about the ‘Peruvian time,’" Ms. Diaz writes in an e-mail message. "If we are invited to a party at 7 p.m., it is rude to show on time. … It is even socially punished. Therefore, not presenting a paper on time is expected and forgiven."

Few Peruvians are familiar with the Spanish word "procrastinaci?n," which complicates discussions of the subject. "Some people think it is some sexual behavior when they hear the word," Ms. Diaz says.

How did I come across this? Well, I’m meeting my supervisor this afternoon so naturally I had to check the weblogs I normally read first (in this case Arts and Letters Daily).

Here are some thoughts/queries I had while I was writing my first (not entirely satisfactory) bit of analysis of the interviews I did for my thesis.
• I didn’t realise until I really got into it that the analysis is a bit like fractal geometry - each individual section could grow to any size as the closer you look at an issue in detail the more you can find to say.
• It is hard to draw boundaries around an individual topic when other related topics keep intruding that would be dealt with in a separate chapter. When it comes to writing up I worry I might end up repeating key points several times in different ways (though perhaps this is not a bad thing?)
• I realise that it is harder than I thought it would be to use the interview text. I can easily characterise an interviewee as having a given attitude based on my familiarity with a whole interview but when it comes to substantiating it with excerpts often I find either the particular sentences are banal and/or they are embedded in a conversational context irrelevant to my theme but without which the sentence is meaningless. To what extent will the reader be willing to take my characterisation of the overall attitudes of interviewees on trust?

I don’t know if anyone out there has thoughts on these points - I imagine these are just concerns that will fade with practice, practice practice!