Introduction:
1.    How weblogs are communities of practice versus other types of communal structures (such as Habermas’ Public sphere, speech communities, Rheingold’s virtual communities)
2.    Conclude with necessity of examining the tension between the platform and the practice.

Vignette 1: Weblogs as a platform
Using Lave and Wegner’s book Communities of Practice as an example, this vignette will be a ‘story’ used to exemplify how the tool remediates a well-established physical ritual in a virtual space via the Jokkmokk winter market case. The focus will be on the affordances of the tool as a facilitator of community.

Case Study 1: Finding the life between the buildings.
Again, a focus on the affordances of the weblog as facilitator of community, but on a more meta scale. This case study examines how community can be teased out from the digital traces between individual weblogs.

Vignette 2: Weblog practices
Similarly to Vignette 1, this vignette will be a ‘story’ used to exemplify how weblogs form into communities of practice by examining a group self identified as a physical community of practice – academic bloggers. The focus of this vignette will be on identifying factors of community membership through aspects of blogging practice. Identity and gender are the two main aspects examined in the following section, but other aspects such as age, ethnicity, class, etc. could/should be units of further research.

Case Study 2: Gender and language in context: Network status as a mediator of gendered variable in weblog community discourse.
-Gender and network structure as aspects of weblog communities of practice.

Case Study 3: Alternative social identity in action: A mediated discourse analysis of pseudonymous blogging.
-Authorship and identity as aspects of weblog communities of practice.

Conclusion:
Exploration of the identifying characteristics of a weblog community of practice, and how the affordances of the weblog as a genre and platform shape these characteristics.

Ok, I know. I said everyday but it has not been everyday. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, I needed to really think about my intro before making it more public. I am actually going to post an outline today and would love feedback. Secondly, I had a little operation on my leg which was supposed to be nothing but has ended up REALLY hurting post op. I have a vlog below if you want to see the not so gory details (and i have a really gory picture of it uncovered, but figured that people probably did NOT want to see that).

Excuse the number of times I say ‘awful’ – if I had vlogged the last few days the operative word would have been a bleep ;-). And I will get back later today with the outline for my intro.

Also, here is a vlog wishing Lilia luck. Her defense is now over and she did great. Surprised? Of course not! I hope I have a similar experience in the fall.

The construction of social identity is not always an explicit process. We create the stories of our identity through discourse actions; and what may be implicit in one mode of discourse may be made explicit in a different communicative mode (Norris, 2004). Every action that we effect contributes to the co-construction of our social identity by accepting, denying, aligning with, or against a discourse. It is through actions that we position artifacts of our identity – foregrounding or backgrounding these artifacts in order to socially construct ourselves. The case study described in this chapter suggests a model to explore alternative social weblog identity through the artifacts or traces left by blogging practices. This model is loosely based on the frameworks of Ron Scollon’s nexus analysis and Sigrid Norris’ multimodal analysis and traces artifacts of identity constructed through the actions of blogging against both the cultural projections assigned to the medium, but also against various modes of communication such as the implied reader and the affordances of the blog’s layout. These frameworks are part of the field of critical discourse analysis called mediated discourse analysis. Mediated discourse analysis is not focused on the discourse alone, but rather on the point at which social practices converge and the role discourse plays in that convergence (Jones and Norris, 2005). The unit of analysis in MDA is the mediated action, which is the point of tension be-tween the meditational means and the social parameters that give action meaning. (Jones and Norris, 2005). In blogging the action always leaves an artifact – whether it be a post, a comment, or a reference to another action. The action and the artifact are involved in a symbiotic relationship; ‘not only is the way we take action transformed by the tools we use, but these tools themselves are transformed by the actions they are appropriated to perform’ (Jones and Norris, 2005:6).

Social identity can be explored through the identifying the macro and micro communicative modes present in the weblog. The macro modes of analysis include the interplay between cultural projection and societal currents. The elements that make up these modes are then ex-pressed through lower-, higher-, or frozen actions. How these actions are foregrounded or backgrounded, i.e., the awareness paid to the actions, suggest claims of social identity.

Usually not a good idea. I know. But I wonder if it may help clarify my text or if it would just complicate things. In this text I use parts of Norris’ multimodal framework, in combination with Scollon’s nexus analysis. The problem, of course, is that I never really explicitly define the different modes, just talk about them in relation to the cultural projects and the societal currents of the nexus analysis. I think I have found a way to incorporate the modes in a non-complicated way by discussing the foregrounding of the actions of the individual posts, the midgrounding of the two disembodied modes (the layout and the presumed reader), and the fact that we can only assume what may be backgrounded as we can not see/analyze the actual blogging action, rather only analyze the artifacts or traces left behind of the communicative event.

(WOW, that was a LOT of jargon)

I am going to try it out tomorrow (or rather, later today) and see how it works.

More later :-)

Remember that application that I was working on? It was an extremely difficult application to write, but today my partners in crime, Susanne and Simon, and I found out that it was accepted!  I am SO excited. This feels like an area where our research can really make a difference in the lives of others. 

Here is a short excerpt:

The role of the Internet as a surrogate social network in situations of domestic violence in Swedish context

The objective of this research project is to establish to what extent Swedish DV victims use the Internet as a way to reconnect with a network of people and information. This study will examine this usage in two important areas of DV: initial information seeking and the ways in which social media are used to create networks. The first part of this project will establish what information is available to DV victims, through which channels this information is available (libraries, women’s’ shelters, websites, social network sites, etc), and how users experience seeking this information. Part two of this project will analyze how Swedish DV victims use social media as a way to form networks after having been isolated during the DV process (Lundgren, 1991). These networks will be analyzed in order to determine the effectiveness of the affordances of the different platforms (e.g., Second Life, discussion forums, blogs, twitter, etc), as well as the strategies that DV victims employ to avoid repercussions, such as cyberstalking, when publicizing information which may not be understood to be personal, although can be used to track or harass the victim. 

I am still trying to contextualize a bit of the background of my chapter on alternative social identity blogs. I rewrote the section today, but sometimes I assume too much. Does this make sense to you?

Identity is the story we tell others about who we think we are. It is the ‘project of the self’ (Giddens, 1991), and often changes to meet the conversational demands of our perceived audience (Bell, 1984). Online diaries and weblogs can provide insight into how social identity is remediated and translated online and over time (McIlvenny and Raudaskoski, 2005). Daniel Chandler (2004) wrote that ‘personal homepages may not always be of great importance to those who come across them, but they’re profound, creative opportunities for people to reflect on themselves and think about how they want to represent themselves to the world’ (Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic, 2004). In a blog that gives limited cues to a physical-world counterpart, however, it can be exceedingly difficult to connect physical-world identities with their online representations. In academic and/or professional blogging communities of practice, your iden-tity is reinforced by your reputation. It is often a simple process to identify if a professional or academic blogger is who he or she says she is as digital traces of their identity are also located beyond the boundaries of the blog – a university/departmental webpage, appearances at con-ferences, journal publications, etc. Yet, in an alternative social identity blog, rather than your social identity serving as a redeeming part of your reputation, their reputations are their iden-tities. The lack of physical markers in an alternative social identity blog leads to alternative means of constructing an identity.

From today’s writing, a small paragraph from the current edit on alternative social identities on what MDA is (for the slightly initiated) and how it relates to blogging. Now I need to talk about social identity as a mediated through blogging action…

Mediated discourse analysis  is not focused on the discourse alone, but rather on the point at which social practices converge and the role discourse plays in that convergence (Jones and Norris, 2005). The unit of analysis in MDA is the mediated action, which is the point of tension between the meditational means and the social parameters that give action meaning. (Jones and Norris, 2005). In blogging the action always leaves an artifact – whether it be a post, a comment, or a reference to another action. The action and the artifact are involved in a symbiotic relationship; ‘not only is the way we take action transformed by the tools we use, but these tools themselves are transformed by the actions they are appropriated to perform’ (Jones and Norris, 2005:6). Blogs are a dual-natured medium, and as such they are a reflection of the author’s thoughts and feelings, but also a channel to report news and commentary. According to Scott Hall in his book, The Blog Ahead: how citizen generated media is radically tilting the communications balance, a blog is a place “to inform and to be informed, a conversation that is, derived from direct information, and an abundance of straight talk.” (Hall, 2006:4, original emphasis). This duality leads to interesting assumptions as to the nature of weblogs. Elements of both print journalism and diary writing have assimilated into a domain of meaning which have social consequences both online and off.

more to come!

I started this blog many years ago to document my masters thesis on blogs. As many of you know, it has morphed from a pseudo-academic blog to a blog full of way too personal tidbits. I had decided a few months ago to retire this blog and keep my visual epidemic site to document my research in the YAPA project. I have decided, however, to keep it up in order to document the last push in my thesis. I need to keep a log of what I am writing in the final phases for myself and to keep my motivation up. So in the spirit of Jane’s final thesis days, I will document the day’s work here – every day. In some ways, this is bringing this blog full circle. The personal tidbits may or may not be here. But the process of getting the thesis done definitely will be!