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

Andre Brock andre.brock at gmail.com
Fri Apr 14 12:43:22 PDT 2006


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



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