2 articles about scholarly blogging practices

I’ve published two articles during the last couple of months! They will be included eventually in my thesis since I’m writing a compilation thesis (sammanläggningsavhandling) which means that it will consist of four articles in total, with a summary that binds them together. It feels great to be able to see that your work suddenly is out there for others to read:

Kjellberg, Sara (2009). “Blogs as Interfaces between Several Worlds: A Case Study of the Swedish Academic Blogosphere”. Human IT, 10:3, 1-45.

Kjellberg, Sara (2009). “Scholarly blogging practice as situated genre: an analytical framework based on genre theory” Information Research, 14 (3) paper 410.

Blogging scientists requires new attitudes

In Nature a big survey has been presented about science journalism. One thing they point out is the influence off blogs in this enterprise. How science journalists both find their stories in blogs and themselves are part of the blogosphere.

In addition in the editorial in Nature yesterday it was mentioned that the attitudes towards science blogging is till mixed and that it is maybe time for a change?

[...]in today’s overstressed media market, scientists must change these attitudes if they want to stay in the public eye. They must recognize the contributions of bloggers and others, and they should encourage any and all experiments that could help science better penetrate the news cycle.

from
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7236/full/458260a.html

[Update] Malin is writing an interesting blog posting in Swedish about the report. She has penetrated some of the material from the survey which is freely accessible and found some interesting comments.

Academic/Research/Scholarly blogs in Holland

I have been collecting blogs written by researchers in Holland for a while now and decided to do a list of what I have got so far. So this Weekend I did a table to put in the blog (I had forgot how tedious work it is to handcode things, but that was the option that I had right now…it was a bit fun too ).

You will find the list as a page under “Stuff”. My main goal was to find blogs by active researchers that are active bloggers and that write in English. All the blogs in the list is maybe not fullfilling all the criteria, but it was a start for me to collect as many as I could find.

List of blogs

Visualising the Public Sphere

I took part in an interesting workshop last week which was co-arranged by VKS and the Philosophical department at Gronigen University. The discussion spanned over a wide area of topics but with the common theme of how we could understand social, political and physical interactions and how that becomes visible in the public space. Anne Beaulieu talked about “Network realism: studying knowledge production around public databases of images”, Martijn de Waal presented ideas on “Urban screens and the Public Sphere”, Paul de Laat tried to connect two of his research areas with the title “Not so Public After All”, Judith Vega introduced “The visualisation for everyday life: pertinent or impertinent in regard to the public sphere” and Paul Wouters discussed the lessons learned from CYSWIK (Can You See What I Know), a two-day multisectorial workshop on knowledge visualisation. It is almost always fruitful to bring together people from different disciplines and see how the different approaches can hook together and form a bigger picture. One problem that where brought up for discussion was how new is new media? Is there new problems in this area or is it the same kind of problems only in a new setting? It all boiled down to that it is a matter of emphasis. A lot of people are using the digital media and the “user-generated” media and are treating it as something new and that is something we as researchers have to take into consideration.

This morning I was again listening to the Swedish radio and overheard their programme “På nätet” (on the net). They have apparently a series of five episodes about our social life on the net and today it was about blogquakes (“bloggbävning”, like a combination of blog and earthquake). The participants talked about the idea that the blogs are making the world more democratic, is it or is it not? This is the discussion that always comes back when talking about blogs and maybe a bit boring in a sense, but connected to the workshop above it suddenly makes more sense. The social practices in the public sphere that are now also present on the web is dynamic and changing and interesting to study further and especially by joining different approaches and disciplines ways of dealing with the problems or questions as research topics.

Collection of Dutch blogs…getting started

I have started the collection of blogs in Holland written by active researchers. I have tried just very briefly browse through and see if the blogger or bloggers has a scholarly background, but I have too look at them again. One more selection criteria is of course that the blogs are updated regularly. The list is growing in my delicious account:

http://delicious.com/sakj/dutch-blog

Looking for the Dutch Academic Blogosphere

My main plan during my stay in Holland is to identify Dutch researchers that are using a blog as a tool and I hope that they will let me interview them. My searching has started and looking into a new slice of the blogosphere I would be happy to get help! I found this directory which I have started browsing:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/country/netherlands/

Not knowing so much Dutch is making a bit harder, but I’m getting by with the combination of knowledge in Swedish, German and English and the blogs that I have found interesting until now seem to use mostly English.

If you have any tips fo me where to find the Dutch Academic Blogosphere I would appreciate all help I can get It is interesting that I suddenly understand that my knowledge about the Swedish blogosphere is quite large, I know where to go, what tools there are etc. Here I have to lean on more general tools like Technorati and the mentioned blogcatalog above.

Forskarbloggar på andra sidan sundet

Idag fick jag ett tips om en blogg på andra sidan vattnet som skrivs av Bodil Christensen og er kommunikationsansvarig på Danmarks Biblioteksskole. Bloggen består av intervjuer av forskare som bloggar och Bodil frågar helt enkelt varför de använder bloggen som verktyg…dvs precis min utgångspunkt för avhandlingen. Det var roligt att få läsa dessa olika personers syn på bloggning och jag hoppas på att min intervjuer så småningom också ska ge en insyn i vad bloggen används till i samband med forskningskommunikation.

Bloggen heter helt enket hvorfor
http://blogs.db.dk/hvorfor/

PCST – konferens om att kommunicera vetenskap

Min handledare Gustav har fått med en session om “The public engagment of science and web 2.0″ på PCST. Malin Sandströms titel på hennes bidrag i sessionen ser lovande ut “Beyond the “cool stuff”: science blogging as a democratic tool”. Konferensen om vetenskaplig kommunikation och interaktion med allmänheten verkar spännande överhuvudtaget. Jag blir verkligen sugen på att delta när jag läser det preliminära programmet och ångrar lite att jag inte avsatte tid att skriva ansökan när deras call for proposals var ute. HEX kommer också vara representerade genom Max Liljefors i sessionen om “Visual science: mediating knowledge through images”. Visserligen går konferensen av stapeln i slutet av juli när man kanske hellre vill ligga på en badstrand än diskutera forskning men å andra sidan är konferensen i Malmö så kanske kan man få till det iallafall

Akademiska bloggar

Bara en kort stund efter att jag upptäckt tråden om varför det är så få kvinnor bland svenska forskare som bloggar på Mothugg skriver Johan och uppmärksammar mig på diskussionen. Det märkliga är att jag i måndags skickade in ett sk short paper till en konferens där jag gjort en mindre kartläggning av svenska akademiska bloggar (tankeläsning?) Jag hittade 78 stycken som överenstämde med mitt kriterium och ja…med ett av resultaten att huvuddelen bloggare är män, 46 stycken av 67 bloggar (eftersom jag räknade bort ett antal gruppbloggar och några anonyma)…Jag har dock inga svar på varför det ser ut som det gör, spekulationerna i diskussionen på Mothugg är lika goda som mina för tillfället. Det kan dock nämnas att studier av den generella bloggosfären gett liknande resultat. Det är oftare män en kvinnor som bloggar.

Jag såg precis att det står en del om forskarbloggande i senaste numret av Naturvetaren:

http://www.naturvetareforbundet.se/www/sn/Natur_CMS.nsf/NV_2-08-s.12-15_vad_betyder_internet_for_forskare-vetenskapsman.pdf

Jag blev intervjuad för ett bra tag sedan och hade glömt bort det. Det var synd att det inte var efter att jag gjort min kartläggning för nu hade jag kunnat svara lite bättre. Jag hinner dock inte gör någon lång utvikning om detta just nu men kan ju hoppas på att återkomma i frågan

fluid

Some notes about the landscape of science blogs 2006:
# The experiment with blogs in Physics at Quantum diaries end in 2005, some bloggers continue
# Seed Magazine starts Scienceblogs.com in January with 14 blogs
# Postgenomic (PG), started in February covering life sciences (about 170 blogs)
# PG got sponsered by Seed
# PG expands to cover Science blogs in general (now about 400 blogs)
# Scienceblogs grows and have now 48 blogs under their umbrella
# Just a week ago PG get sponsoring from Nature instead…and changes it looks a bit
# Nature does a list of top 50 blogs in Science based on Technorati data