[Air-l] searching for genre-specific blogs (Douglas Eyman)

[Abigail Groves]

Andre,
I'm not contributing to this discussion, but I did notice your name on the 
email.  We met at the aoir conference last year - I thought I'd drop a line 
and say hi.  I hope your dissertation is going well.
Regards,
Abi
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andre Brock" <andre.brock at gmail.com>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2006 5:43 AM
Subject: [Air-l] searching for genre-specific blogs (Douglas Eyman)


> I'm studying African American weblogs and online media for my 
> dissertation;
> i did a technorati and bloglines search initially, but was really
> unsatisfied with the results because many of the African American blogs i
> read weren't included.  I did a snowball sample, using informants 
> (bloggers)
> and their blogrolls, said inspiration being derived by work that Susan
> Herring and some others have been doing a lot of work on blogs recently
> (cites below).
>
> That worked really well for me, but i should add that it worked well 
> because
> i was looking for bloggers discussing a specific race-related incident.  I
> did so because such incidents seem to crystallize discussions of identity,
> which of course in a blogging context is performed discursively and often
> reified in the comments.
>
> Basically, if you're looking for a performance of identity - which is what
> i'm getting when you use the word "genre" - you need to find content that
> encourages an articulation of that identity.  Thousands of bloggers write
> about their cats, but cats are pretty much a race-neutral topic.  Look for
> topics that incite comment, and you'll find your target population.
>
> Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Scheidt, L. A., and Wright, E. (2004). Women 
> and
> children
> last: The discursive construction of weblogs. In L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic,
> L.
> Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric,
> Community, and Culture of Weblogs. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
>
> Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Paolillo, J. C., Scheidt, L. A., Tyworth, M.,
> Welsch, P.,
> Wright, E., and Yu, N. (2005). Conversations in the blogosphere: An 
> analysis
>
> "from the bottom up." Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i 
> International
>
> Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.
> http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/blogconv.pdf
>
> Andre
>
> --
> Andre Brock
> PhD Candidate - Library and Information Studies
> Project Athena Fellow
> POSSE Mentor - UIUC Posse 2 (217.333.4693)
> University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
> _______________________________________________
> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: 
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>