I have been re-reading Colette and came upon this passage where she describes her father’s writing desk:

A pad of virgin blotting paper; an ebony ruler; one, two, four, six pencils, sharpened with a penknife and all of different colours; pens with medium nibs and fine nibs, pens with enormously broad nibs, drawing pens no thicker than a blackbird’s quill; sealing wax, red, green and violet; a hand blotter, a bottle of liquid glue… a big inkpot flanked by a little inkpot, both in bronze, and a lacquer bowl filled with a golden powder to dry the wet page, another bowl containing sealing wafers of all colours (I used to eat the white ones); to right and left of the table, reams and reams of paper, cream-laid, ruled, watermarked…

And Colette in this passage doesn’t even enter into the seductive smell of a stack of unused paper. I used to love to go into stationers’ shops and prowl around and look at all the paper-related gadgets. Now I fear the magic of such places is being lost or at least is becoming a marginalised luxury for print and writing hobbyists, scrapbookers and the like. I am certainly attached to my computer gadgetry – I delight in the variety of things my iPod Touch enables me to do and enjoy tinkering and adding functionality even when I don’t really need it - but the enchantment is not aesthetic. Compare the passage above with this attempt of mine…

A new MacBook pristinely white with its unblinking webcam eye staring back at me, surrounded by snaking cables bringing power in, trailing out to the superfluous but more convenient mouse and to a colour printer which dwarfs the computer it serves but which languishes days without being used in this increasingly paperless and environmentally conscious world. Invisibly also it connects to the unseen wider world of the internet via WiFi…

No, even had I Colette’s gifts I think I would find it hard to visualise computers and their accessories as comparably aesthetically pleasurable instruments to use. Of course we have gained in efficiency from the change from atoms to bits for communication but every so often I am reminded of what we are slowly losing.

100,000 words summarised at a glance - click to see it full-sized.

I knew this would happen sooner or later. I have a fairly unusual name and nobody with any online prominence who is anything like me has popped up online. Until now. I therefore would like it to be on the record that I have nothing to do with The Social Media Bible (even though I have been studying social media for the last 6 years). The David Brake who is co-authoring that book is David Kendrick Brake - I am David Russell Brake (and I am starting to think that it might be expedient to use that middle name for my publications). Not that I would want you to get the impresson I don’t like the book - I haven’t seen it and don’t know the authors (though I had swapped emails with my namesake briefly earlier when I noticed his/our name online).

Hi All,

This is an introduction! I am Ranjana, a doctoral student (2008-2011) at the LSE, in the Department of Media and Communications where I am researching youthful interpretations of Web 2.0 genres, focusing in particular on the interplay of digital literacies and legibilities in young peoples’ negotiations of social networking sites. My research combines creative/playful/unorthodox methods(like user-representations of SNS) with more tried and tested social research methods (like Interviews). This research is currently supported by the Media Research Studentship at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

My research interests include:

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

My first degree back in the 80s was in English so from time to time I enjoy dipping back into literature. In this case I combined my interest in social Internet applications with literature by listening to Conrad’s Lord Jim as an audiobook thanks to a reading by a volunteer at Librivox (which recruits volunteers to read public domain books).

I am obviously moving away from the literary criticism of my first degree towards a more sociological mindset - I found myself thinking “Conrad’s minute observation of the way people interact and behave is so impressive. It reminds me of Erving Goffman“. I wonder what my favourite English prof Sandy Leggatt would think of me now…
David Brake

Today I finally got down to work on writing up my first sketchy analysis of the interviews with personal webloggers which are at the heart of my thesis. My personal pattern with writing usually follows a fairly predictable path:

Stage 1: Avoidance
Just read one more book, brew one more cup of tea or, if necessary play a few more hours of the latest game before starting.
Stage 2: Paralysis
It’s all in my head - ish - but where do I begin?
Stage 3: Sketchy outline
A vague idea of how the piece might fit together - a few lines of text in outline form in Word.
Stage 4: Paralysis again
Hmm… This writing business is harder than I thought. Maybe I should try a little Stage 1 for a while longer. Eventually I progress to…
Stage 5: Write first draft
This I tend to do in a few long bursts of effort - at this point I become anti-social and absorbed until it is all written out.
Stage 6: Read it over
I’m not good at this - I can’t seem to spot the flaws even though they are obvious to anyone else (like most people…). So therefore…
Stage 7: Circulate to friends and unfortunate wife
A vital stage where they spot all the obvious flaws and infelicities. I really like getting feedback - even negative feedback. I think this is where my journalistic background helps - I’m used to being edited and recognise it normally improves my work.
Sage 8: Incorporate feedback.
Done!

At the moment I am at about stage 4.5 (as the chart below indicates)

177 / 3,000 (5.9%)

Update: Two days (and one bout of gastroenteritis) later

442 / 3,000 (13.0%)

Thanks to Prolurkr for using and thereby telling me about that little graphy-thing. Hopefully I will be driven to write in order to be able to show off my progress on it.

I have to have something put together by Monday. Please cheer me on! And please add yourselves to our world map so we can feel as if the whole world is watching.

I’m transcribing interviews with my London-based bloggers at the moment and no matter how many times it happens it still fills me with pleasure to hear the really interesting stuff come out as I listen effectively for the first time (during an interview itself I find I am only about 50% listening and 50% thinking about what to ask next or what I might have missed). But transcribing is also a gruelling discipline. I started transcribing one woman just now and was five minutes in thinking ’she’s interesting but she’s also speaking quite fast - I hope I won’t wear out before I finish’. Then I looked up at the audio track and saw that this interview is two hours long!

Most of them tend to be an hour to an hour and 20 minutes but that’s both the strength and the drawback to semi-structured interviewing. If you are getting good material you can keep it going but at some point you are going to end up having to transcribe and then analyse all that material which you tend to forget is much more time-consuming than the interview itself. This one interview will probably take me about eight solid hours just to transcribe (and since I can’t transcribe like that without copious breaks that probably means a few days’ work). Phew. Better get back to it…

It has been a little frustrating to spend days at AoIR6 meeting all kinds of interesting people but not being able to tell them much about my own research because I had not yet done any analysis.

Well, I spent a good year and a half narrowing down my question and theoretical framework (Stage I) and several months doing data collection (Stage II) - today I ‘officially’ start analysing my fieldwork (Stage III)! In this case, this means producing a rough coding frame for my 24 interviews (so far) with London-based personal webloggers.

Don’t get too impatient to see my results yet - I don’t expect to have produced anything for Stage IV (writing up) until next year but I feel like I’m moving along at last. This is certainly a different rate of progress than I had in journalism when a month seemed like forever to produce something - but of course I hope to dig a whole lot deeper in to my subject…

P.S. I was wondering why my posts about AoIR weren’t appearing in the AoIR6 feed - I had mis-written the tag. Oh well.

To my mind the scary PhD moment #1 has to be the moment when you think "my research doesn’t add up to anything". I think I am past that - but closely following behind it has to be what I am facing at the moment - "my research was going to show something really interesting… but I just read this article which covers the ground already."

Fortunately, in the social sciences rather than the hard sciences you are unlikely to get a situation where your research has been completely superseded by someone else’s findings, but one of the things that can keep you going through the PhD process is the feeling that you have found some aspect of your field that nobody else has spotted.

In my case, my qualitative examination of weblogging has in part been motivated by a desire to problematise the early essentialist conceptions of weblogging that suggested "weblogs are all…" X, Y or Z. Then I finally got around to reading some of the articles in my ‘to read’ list - particularly Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog - part of the excellent Into the Blogosphere collection - and Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs, both written last year and both providing just the kind of nuanced treatment of blogging and its motivations that I had immodestly hoped to pioneer. Oh well - back to standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward a few inches at a time…