[Air-L] Qualitative studies of blogs

Kathryn Grafton grafton at interchange.ubc.ca
Fri Jul 9 12:53:18 PDT 2010


Hi Alex (and list ... this is also my first reply) - 

I am a PhD candidate in Language and Literature at the University of British Columbia, Canada (about to defend at the end of the month), and part of my work focuses on book blogs and online reading communities. I also just taught a course on blog studies. There are a number of qualitative studies of blog posts and comments from the perspective of new rhetorical genre theory. You might think of genre theory as a kind of discourse analysis. Here are some examples (many from a new edited collection, Genres in the Internet):

Grafton, Kathryn. "Situating the Public Social Actions of Blog Posts."  Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre. Eds. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Benjamins, 2009. 85-111.

Grafton, Kathryn, and Elizabeth Maurer. "Engaging with and Arranging for Publics in Blog Genres." Linguistics and the Human Sciences 3.1 (2007): 47-66.

Maurer, Elizabeth. "'Working Consensus' and the Rhetorical Situation: The Homeless Blog's Negotiation of Generic Evolution and Innovation."  Genres in the Internet. Eds. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Benjamins, 2009.

McNeill, Laurie. "Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet." Biography 26.1 (2003): 24-47.

McNeill, Laurie. "Brave new genre, or generic colonialism? Debates over ancestry in Internet diaries." The Internet and the Theory of Genre. Eds. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Benjamins, 2009. 143-162.

Miller, Carolyn, and Dawn Shepherd. "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog."  Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Eds. Laura J Gurak, et al., 2004.

Miller, Carolyn, and Dawn Shepherd. "Questions for Genre Theory from the Blogosphere."  The Internet and the Theory of Genre. Eds. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Benjamins, 2009.

Puschmann, Cornelius. "Lies at Wal-Mart: Style and the subversion of genre in the Life at Wal-Mart blog." The Internet and the Theory of Genre. Eds. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Benjamins, 2009. 49-84.

Rak, Julie. "The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity." Biography 28.1 (2005): 166-82.


And this is another qualitative study of posts (ethnography):

Schoneboom, Abigail. "Diary of a Working Boy: Creative Resistance among Anonymous Workbloggers." Ethnography 8.4 (2007): 403-23.

Finally, if you haven't seen it, you might also find the online collections, Into the Blogosphere, productive for your work: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/

Best,

Kathryn

> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2010 04:23:57 +0400
> From: Semenov Alexander <semenoffalex at googlemail.com>
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] Text analysis of blog posts and comment threads:
> 	discourse	analysis vs. conversation analysis
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTikdvKQOqUC2K3_WBIyu5x_FMlOVJHoHqAETbthm at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Hello everybody,
> I'm interested in qualitative text analysis of posts and comment treads in
> LiveJournal. I've found previous request on this topic in the aoir
> archieves, but it was 2 years ago (
> http://listserv.aoir.org/htdig.cgi/air-l-aoir.org/2008-September/017172.html).
> >From one of the responses (
> http://listserv.aoir.org/htdig.cgi/air-l-aoir.org/2008-September/017187.html)
> I've founded the following articles relevant to my interest:
> 
> Harrison S (2004) 'Subverting conversational repair in computer-mediated
> communication: pseudo repair and refusal to repair in a hostile email
> discussion' in Mike Baynham, Alice Deignan and Goodith White (eds.)
> Applied Linguistics at the Interface, British Studies in Applied
> Linguistics Volume 19. London: BAAL Equinox, pp63-77
> 
> Harrison, S (2007) 'Transgressions, miscommunication and flames:
> problematic incidents in email discussions' in Mia Consalvo & Caroline
> Haythornthwaite, (Eds.) AoIR Internet Annual Volume 4, New York: Peter
> Lang, pp 105-117
> 
> Harrison, S (2008) 'Turn taking in email discussions' in Sigrid Kelsey
> and Kirk St.Amant (eds.) Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated
> Communication. Hershey, Pennsylvania: Information Science Reference
> 
> Harrison S and Allton D (forthcoming - draft paper submitted) 'Apologies
> in email discussions'
> 
> But I still have some questions:
> 
> 1) Which method would you prefer for such kind of analysis: discourse
> analysis or conversational analysis?
> 2) Are there any other artcles about qualitative text analysis of blog posts
> and comment threads?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alexander Semenov.
> MA student
> Faculty of Sociology
> Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES)
> http://www.msses.ru/English/index.html
> 
> Graduate Student in Sociology at
> State University - Higher School of Economics
> http://www.hse.ru/eng
>
--
Kathryn Grafton
grafton at interchange.ubc.ca

><><><><><><><><>>>

The very word "genre" sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is. -- Northrop Frye




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