What are the dominant research areas connected to blogs? Off the top of my head, I would say seven:
Hypertext - literature studies
Genre studies - again, within leterature and media studies
Social networks and online communities - social sciences coupled with information science
Cyber culture - sociology and ethnography
Technology, software - information science, informatics
Journalism - media studies and sociology
Media politics - media studies and sociology, ethnicity and gender
I am certain there is research done which does not fit in any of these categories, but at the moment I can't see it. And the categories need to be more precisely described. Anybody got any thougths on this?
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I'm afraid I can't really contribute in matters of refining these areas, although the "Cyber culture - sociology and ethnography" sounds a bit dodgy to me.
Maybe that's just my personal bias as anthropologist, wanting to see a big gap between what anthropology is up to and what other similar sciences do.
Where would you fit an emerging area I'd call "identity, (self)-representation, autoethnography"? Like a bit what Lilia is up to these days...Oh, you asked for *dominant* areas - well I guess it will be a dominant one one day...
:-)
First: both sociology and ethnography studies culture, but in different manners.
Second: I put Lilia under Social networks and online communities. Lilia may disagree, I'd love to hear why :)
Peter, I am sure I do, do you have examples of research on blogs in these fields?
I've kept returning to this list over the past few days, having found yet another approach to blogging that didn't seem to be on the list, and each time I looked and there it was -- a category where my latest find neatly fits.
I think that if you grouped these items into some supercategories, that might help. For instance, informatics and genre are formal, while literary and social are both expressive. Rather than try to eliminate the overlap between subcategories, perhaps some kind of sliding scale -- individual at the top, communal at the bottom... formal at the left, expressive at the right.
Mabye those aren't the right scales to use, but your post has kept me thinking over the past few days.
I suppose edublogging would fall under genre studies, but that makes the most sense only for lit/composition studies. Not all edubloggers use a genre approach.
Dennis, I think perhaps I should make an individual slot for the edubloggers, as Education or pedagogics, as we'd call it here, is a field where weblogs are very much explored and researched.
Right now I am working my way through the articles on the AOIR conferences, to see what topics the blog papers there cover. Afterwards I am going to dive into the hypertext conferences and make a search for different media theory conferences. Anybody got suggestions for academic conferences where I can expect blogs to be a topic? (yes, I know about blogtalk *S*)
I already replied to Torill via e-mail, but for anyone else reading this thread, the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) is a big rhetcomp conference that often includes related sessions.
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