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

[Abrile Juan]

Hola,
 
I'm Juan Abrile, a new arrival in the the AIR-list serv. I'm a doctoral candidate in an interdisciplinary program at Université de Montréal. My dissertations will be about the representations of language, immigration and integration on the blogs of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans as they prepare for immigrating to Quebec and experience the early settlement in Montreal.
 
Currently, I'm in the process of revising my thesis proposal...and it is in the midst of this thinking process that I'm confronted with certain issues which I am not sure how to deal with. That's why I'd really welcome your thoughts, comments, suggestions etc.
 
This is, in a nutshell, where my thinking is at in terms of methodology
 
I have formed a corpus of 14 blogs, each of which I will consider as a case. Within each blog, I will focus on the blog posts whose content (e.g., oral and written texts, visuals and hyperlinks) has been created by the author of the blog and explicitly refers to language, immigration and integration issues. I will not look at the comments of other blog readers and neither will I look at the content displayed elsewhere on the web pages (e.g., links to Facebook, clickable ads, etc. which are part of the general configuration of the blog). I am, however, interested in looking at the websites / web pages which are "external" to the blog under analysis and which can be accesed by means of the hyperlinks included in a post.
 
For analyzing written and oral texts, I'm drawing on Faiclough's CDA (1992, 1995, 2003) approach, chiefly his way of analyzing discourse representation and assumptions. For exmining visuals, I'll be using Kress and van Leeuven's (2006) stance on visuals as ideological statements advancing a particular representation of the social world, social actors and social processes. Finally, for coping with hyperlinks, I'm considering Burbules' (1997) view of links as rhetorical artefacts, which may tie in well with Myers' (2010) taxonomy of links (I'm also aware of Lemke's)
 
Now my questions:
 
1) Can one treat a blog as a case, chiefly considering the difficulty of delineating the boundaries of the blog? 
 
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?
 
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? 
 
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?
 
Thank you so much for taking the time to read such a long e-mail.
 
Looking forward to your comments,
 
Juan
 
 
 
Juan Abrile
Doctorant en Sciences humaines appliquées
Université de Montréal