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!

A big “thank you” is due to Hanna (who are you? Why not add yourself to our little map and tell us about your research?) who brought Transcriva to my attention - a lovely little Mac application for transcription. It costs $19.99 but you can try it out with few limitations and it works better in some ways than the software I had been using - Transana - in a number of respects (though Transana does much more than transcription alone). She also reminded me of the existence of Express Scribe which was a commercial product and is now free. It is available in both Windows and Mac versions and claims that it, “works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text” which is, of course, the holy grail for transcribers. I wouldn’t expect an interview to work though since you would have two different speakers and background noise to contend with. Windows users may also want to check out Dictation Buddy but it costs $33 and as far as I can tell doesn’t offer any important advantages over Express Scribe.

Or of course if you have the money you can always farm your transcription out to Katwa or another commercial transcribing company (for $50 per hour of transcribed audio). Since it takes around 4 hours (for me at least) to transcribe an hour of audio it may well be worth considering!

Update: I spoke too soon - you should still keep an eye on Transcriva (and Transana is still in Alpha for the Mac so if you are a Mac user you have to ask the programmers for a copy) but I am going back to Transana for the moment as Transcriva has some niggling irritations (eg it doesn’t handle recordings longer than 1hr well for example and doesn’t let you do any text formatting as you type to indicate emphasis).

The MECCSA Postgraduate Network is a great idea - bringing together media PhD students from across the UK who would otherwise rarely if ever meet. I had a great time and met some interesting people I would never have run across if I hadn’t gone. If you are a PhD student based in the UK (or think you might become one by next year) you should definitely think about going to next year’s one in Ulster…

Many librarians (and academics) are accustomed to being somewhat snobbish about the Internet and often rightly so. Historically it has been great at providing stuff dealing with current events and issues but it has tended to have a lousy “memory”. If you want to know what people wrote and thought prior to 1998 or so, you normally need to consult a library.
This is now starting to change. In 2003 there was a flurry of announcements from Amazon, Google and others about making the full text of books available online and searchable. I confess I assumed most of this would be out of copyright not very useful texts but Google Print just (covertly) made it possible to search just the books they have scanned in (thanks Google Blog!) and a search for major theorists like my old friend Bourdieu shows a lot of good, ‘major league’ academic books are now there. I also stumbled across some entertaining recreational reading…

It’s harder to tell what Amazon has got as it mixes search by author and title etc with keyword search using the same form. Note - this only works if you search via Amazon.com (the US site) - it isn’t available through Amazon UK yet.

Of course even if you find a book you want to read via Google Print you have to read it on screen or print it out one page at a time. Amazon only lets you read a few pages from any one book as a taster.

P.S. If the book you want isn’t available in full text, a Yahoo or Google search for a book title may tell you which university or public libraries it is available at.

Update: I didn’t realise that Google like Amazon will only let you see a few pages at a time from any of the books you find if that book is still in copyright.

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I innocently thought I would apply Foucault’s concept of Technologies of the Self to personal weblogging (since it seems to me the personal weblog has a lot in common with the self-reflexive and discursive practices Foucault outlined late in his life). Unfortunately, I immediately stumbled into a bog of academic debate from which I am struggling to extricate myself. Little did I realise how contentious Foucault’s ideas about self are - particularly among feminists. Made me feel a bit like Mary Hudock who defines Technologies of the Self thus:

Foucault’s phrase ‘technologies of the self’ refers to ways in which people put forward, and police, their ’selves’ in society; and the ways in which they are enabled or constrained in their use of different techniques by available and disenchanting discourses where the geometric flux abdicates the signifier, leaving us even further removed from any coherent sense of “self” and with our heads on the floor after downing a whole bottle of Jack Daniels in search of the ever-elusive transendental signifier that just might, just might, lead to a sense of self.

I am not sure that even my Finger Foucault can help me now… Maybe I should have stuck with Bourdieu after all!

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Yes I know that transcribing your own interviews is ‘good for you’ (makes you listen closely again to what was said, captures the nuance of how they said it etc) but if you have a non-PhD project that involves lots of interviews and you can’t face all that work yourself, there are people who will do it for you. And other people who use such services who have already tried them out. I asked the author of one of the comments to the post above - Doug Kaye of IT Conversations - who it was he found that did good transcriptions for $50 per hour of transcribed audio and he pointed me to Katwa in India, which specialises in medical transcriptions but obviously does other kinds of transcription ‘on the side’.
Thanks to Boing Boing for the link

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Strangely, many people have asked me for my tips and tricks on literature searching recently. So I thought, hey, I’ll write it down and then point people to the blog instead of describing it again.

This process is intended to produce a relatively comprehensive and systematic review of literature pertaining to your topic or question. It’s a good way to master a new area and locate key articles in a relatively short space of time. It replaces (for me) a lot of fumbling around and hoping I’ve got everything. With this, you won’t get everything but you can be pretty confident you haven’t left anything big out.

This is how it works.

Step One: Choose search strings.
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. So the first thing to do is identify the area you are searching. Recently, I wrote part of a massive and evil literature review on media literacy, intended to cover all electronic media. I created the following initial search strings:

• “media literacy”
• “television literacy”
• “radio literacy”
• “telephone literacy”
• “film literacy”
• “computer literacy”
• “Internet literacy”

Some of them are stupid, of course (telephone literacy?) but then what do I know about literacy? It was a useful first step, as it turned out.

Step Two: Create initial annotated bibliographies.

This is where computers are really cool. The key tool you need here is EndNote, which LSE provides on its computers and at a rottenly expensive ?70 to its students (but the commercial version is hugely expensive, so what can you do?). Also you need a connection to various academic databases, again which LSE provides.

Then you search for your terms in this general order and export them to EndNote (I’ll explain this in a minute):

1. Books and book chapters. A fabulous way to do this is to use OCLC’s WorldCat, which looks in academic libraries all over the world to see their book listings and brings them to you in exportable format. Lovely. The really great thing about WorldCat is that you get chapter headings for many of the books! So you can finally find that key article in a collected volume. Whoopee! Bad news: the exporting function seems to be really slow and horrible. I’ve found the best way is to export page by page.
2. Articles. I use ISI’s Web of Science as my primary port of call. It indexes everything in the social sciences. But you should also check out the other databases available. Search for your terms, “Mark All” on the list (it’ll do up to 500), go to the “Marked List” page and tick the boxes that say “Abstract” and “Times Cited”. Then export to End Note.

Step Two-A: Exporting to EndNote.
This is cool. Sorry, I just had to say that, because it was a revelation to me when I started to do this. OK: The first thing to do is create a new EndNote file. Call it, for example, media_literacy_ISI. You’ll be creating a lot of EndNote files so a name that includes the search term and the source is helpful. (Also helpful to keep note of what you searched for when in a separate place).

To get the references into EndNote, you first look for the option in your database that says “Export to reference software”. This is on the “marked list” page in ISI and on the search results page in WorldCat. So, press the button. Depending on how your computer is set up, it will either automatically ask you for an EndNote library (point it to the one you just created), or you will have the option to save the results as a file.

If it goes to EndNote automatically, you will be faced with a long list of things called “filters” which makes sure that the bibliography arrives safely, with the author in the author field and not in the title. For WorldCat, choose the “WorldCat” filter from the list; for ISI, choose ISI. Simple.

NOTE: EndNote has lots of filters available, and you can install them (like, I installed a filter for the results from the Digital Dissertations archive). The best place, I’ve found, is the University of Queensland’s library. I love those guys. Also the EndNote site has some, but they are a bit harder to use. It’s pretty difficult to install new filters on the standard LSE configuration because the ‘filters’ folder is locked. If you’re using your own laptop, just save the filter you want to the filters folder and it will show up on the list.

If you saved your results as a file, just choose File/Import, and choose the right filter (as explained above)from the Import Option… list.

Step Three: Print your huge annotated bibliography.
You now probably have several hundred records in your EndNote file. Choose the “Annotated” bibliography format. I print them two pages to a page, double sided. You now have a giant book of abstracts of everything related to your field. It is a horrifying, insuperable amount of information. This is where Step Four comes in.

Step Four: Map your area
I discovered mind-mapping during my MBA, and I swear by it for this particular application. It was developed by Tony Buzan, who wrote a several books about it, and it’s really fairly simple. You basically take the key concepts that you see in your abstracts and link them together visually, one word or phrase per line. Kind of like an outline. So, with “literacy” as my central concept, I had a chain that said “media”, then “purpose”. “Democracy”, “pluralism” and “social justice” were all linked to “purpose”. Here’s an image of the map I made. I also add, after each final key concept (like “democracy”) the author’s name and year in capital letters. That way, when I want to read the article about democracy as the purpose for media literacy, I just look up the author’s name in my handy-dandy EndNote bibliography.

You can see I’ve used a computer to make my map, but I’ve also done them by hand, which Buzan advocates. I used MindManager, which isn’t free. FreeMind, an open-source application that was developed after I bought MindManager also gets great reviews. And it is free. Which is good.

You may want to highlight certain articles. I highlighted the most recent ones, because the review was meant to be a review of recent literature. Another good possibility is highlighting those cited above a certain number of times. If you ticked the “Times Cited” box on your ISI export, this is something you can find out. You can also search ISI to check the citation figures on the books you found in WorldCat, if you’re compulsive. Knock yourself out.

Step Five: Read your articles
You knew it would come to this. This is where the rest of your academic training comes to your aid, and you can put this nasty article away.

William Germano - a publishing director at Routledge - provides some good advice about how to make your dissertation interesting in book form, and some provocative assertions about why dissertations are often dull reads - eg. “The manuscript you produce as a degree requirement needs to demonstrate that you know the history of your field, that you have propitiated various deities, that you’ve found the right giant on whose shoulders you can climb and wave your tiny hat.”
(Thanks to Terri Senft for the link).

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