[Air-L] Blogs for social science research: Dilemmas

Jeremy hunsinger jeremy at tmttlt.com
Wed Aug 11 08:57:45 PDT 2010


>
>
> 1) Can one treat a blog as a case, chiefly considering the difficulty of
> delineating the boundaries of the blog?
>

yes , but one can also choose a set of blogs as a case, or even a post on a
blog as a case.  The answer here is 'what makes sense to your argument?'

>
> 2) Is it feasible to look at 14 blogs, even though I won't be examining
> every little component? How many would be "enough" for a dissertation?
>

1, the amount of data you use has no relationship to the dissertation
necessarily, what is important is what contributions your dissertation
makes.

>
> 3) Isn't it rather ambitious of my part to analyze texts, visuals and the
> content of the webpages which are connected to a given blog post by means of
> the hyperlinks embedded in that post?
>

no, it is not ambitious. multimodal discourse analysis has been doing it for
years... and hyperlinks are one indicator, the question is 'indicator of
what' and 'for whom' and 'why', but hyperlinks aren't the only indicator.

>
> 4) If I just looked at one mode of semiosis (e.g., written texts), what
> would then be the point of looking at these texts online if one does not
> attend to the words or stretches of text which fulfill the double function
> of being part of the text and nodal points?
>

what would the point be in any case?  online or offline, texts are always
conjoined and disjointed, just because there is not a hyperlink reference
does not mean there is not referentiality and other modes of reference.  No
text is necessarily anything... it is up to you to argue what it is, and why
it should be thought of as such.



> --
jeremy hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com

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