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Nine months, nine chapters… March 28, 2009

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Dissertation, PhD.
9 comments

I have nine months left of my PhD scholarship, which means nine months to finish the nine chapters, that my dissertation is composed of. As anyone who has ever tried it can probably testify, writing a 300 pages dissertation is a bumpy ride with many ups and downs.

On a weekly basis I enjoy the comics from PHD Comics – and I could especially relate to this one, as I often ask myself “how, when and why” 😀

Btw, I feel sorry for not being so active when it comes to blogging – but now you know why.

Enjoying “Internet Inquiry” February 26, 2009

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Internet Research, Methodology.
3 comments

I am reading Nancy Baym and Annette Markham‘s edited book Internet Inquiry at the moment and I am enjoying it very much. It is composed of six sections with six different questions, each of them answered by a main author and two responding authors. The book is “based on the premise that there is no recipe to getting it right, instead there are smart ways of thinking through key questions“, as Baym writes about the book on her blog.

Especially, I was intrigued by Lori Kendall‘s rather personal discussion of gender, sexuality and power relations in ethnographic studies in chapter four. Based on personal experiences, Kendall points out that “both gender and sexuality affect and are affected by our sense of self and our experience of fieldwork. These aspects of identity also interact and jointly affect people’s relationships with each other, including relationships between researchers and the people they study” (p. 116). I think this is an important point in relation to the (perceived) role of the researcher in the field and it made me think about some of my own experiences during my ethnography of Arto in 2005:

Some boys sent me ‘dirty messages’, called for webcam sex or commented on my looks. I also received some of those rather offensive sexual comments that the female users of Arto get from time to time. […] I found my gender to play a role in the ethnographic investigation and I agree with Lindlof and Shatzer that embodiment is a big part of an ethnography and one must content with ones body and looks being part of the investigation. Drawing on Warren (1988) the authors point out the fact that also in computer mediated communication the bodies of woman ethnographers affect the way they are perceived in the field and the roles and motives that are attributed to them (Lindlof and Shatzer 1998). In most cases my role and motive was  perceived as the one of a researcher, but for some I was a future good online friend, a big sister, a possible girlfriend or flirt (some boys actually stated that they liked ‘older women’) or  simply as an adult who would listen to them. (Larsen, 2007)

I also really enjoyed Malin Sveningsson Elm‘s thoughts on research ethics in her answer to the third question about how notions of privacy influence research choices. In her section Elm stresses the fact that public/private should not be seen as a dichotomy, but rather as a continuum. She proposes that we look at  different online environments as:

  • public (like open chat rooms)
  • semi-public (like social network sites)
  • semi-private (like intranets) or
  • private (like online photo albums or private chat rooms)
    (p. 75).

when deciding to study them with or without getting informed consent. (But she does point out that some online environments (such as social network sites) do not fit neatly into just one category!) Elm goes on to discuss the imposing difficulty of dealing with ethical issues in practice and her text certainly gave me ideas for the discussion of research ethics in my PhD dissertation.

By the way, let me take this opportunity to announce that Malin Sveningsson Elm will be a keynote speaker at the PhD course on Social Media that I am involved in planning.

My PhD Blog Stats 2008 – and Happy New Year December 31, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Blog.
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Today “My PhD Blog” can celebrate its second birthday. Exactly two years ago I started blogging about my PhD project and interrelated subjects. So far this has resulted in 90 posts and more than 300 comments, which is okay. (This year I have been less active than in 2007.)

Originally, I created this blog “in order to keep track of my thoughts, my work, my inspiration, my ideas and my research“, which I think I have succeeded in. However, looking back I can see that I am also blogging a lot about topics related to youth and online social networking in general (which I guess is also empirical data).

At this point I have exactly one year left of my PhD scholarship. That also means that 2009 will be devoted to writing my dissertation. I still plan to blog now and then and I hope that the blog can be useful in what will undoubtedly be a frustrating and tough process from time to time…

Happy New Year to all readers of “My PhD Blog”!

And here are some momentary stats from the blog:

blog-stats-2008

Upcoming PhD course on social media November 6, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, PhD.
5 comments

Together with PhD student Stine Lomborg from the University of Aarhus I am currently planning a PhD course about social media to be held in Denmark next year (24th to 26th of June 2009). The course is entitled “Social Media: Analysing Identity, Sociality and Creativity in Online Networked Environments” and is open to PhD students who do research into the uses of new social media in everyday life.

The general aim of the course is to address new social media as means of self-creation, peer-to-peer production and social networking. The more particular aims are 1) to discuss conceptual and theoretical tools to analyse the intersections of identity formation, community building and content creation in online networked environments 2) to strengthen the participants’ analytical skills when dealing with complex and multimodal empirical data 3) to enhance analytical reflexivity when studying the everyday uses of social media.

The course will be funded and sponsored by The Danish National Research School for Media, Communication, and Journalism (FMKJ) and The Post Graduate Research School of Human Centered Communication and Informatics (HCCI) at Aalborg University. Read more about the course here.

So far, we have a number of interesting international scholars who will present their research and give feedback to PhD students during the course. At the moment Nancy Baym, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at University of Kansas, JosÊ van Dijck, Professor at Universiteit van Amsterdam, Anne Scott Sørensen, Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark, and Marika Lßders, Researcher at SINTEF, have confirmed their participation.

Stay tuned for more info.

Roundtable: Life on the move October 23, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Internet Research.
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I really enjoyed last week’s Association of Internet Researches conference, ”Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place”, which was very well organised. Besides presenting a paper I participated in a roundtable discussion called “Life on the move” chaired by Daniel Skog (UmeĂĽ University, Sweden) and Lewis Goodings (Loughborough University, UK) and with participation from Raquel Recuero (Catholic University of Pelotas, Brazil), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas, US), Jan Schmidt (Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Germany) and Amanda Lenhart (Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, US).

All of us are doing research on online social networking or online communities and in the roundtable we sat out to discuss how we as researchers can analyse the online practices of people when they move between many different sites, both online and offline. With more than 100 people in the audience I think we managed to have a good and interesting discussion.

Thanks to Thies Willem BĂśttcher the roundtable was recorded and you can download it in MP3 format here.

Also, see the blog posts about the roundtable from Lewis, Daniel and Nancy.

IR 9.0 October 15, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Internet Research.
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5 comments

For the next three days I will be attending the conference ”Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place” at the IT University in Copenhagen. It is the annual Association of Internet Researchers‘ conference which is held in Denmark this year. More than 420 researchers from all over the world will be participating in the conference.

The theme this year addresses some important issues in relation to internet research: How do we understand ‘community’ in the age of online connectedness? How do we study communities when they move across different sites? And how do we address the blurring of boundaries between online and offline practices and places?

See the confrence programme here.

PhD course: The analytical leap October 5, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Methodology, PhD.
6 comments

The next couple of days I am attending a PhD course called “The analytical leap: Knowledge production in communication research” with Adele E. Clarke, author of “Situational Analysis. Grounded theory after the Post-Modern Turn”. The course is arranged by the The Danish National Research School for Media, Communication, and Journalism (FMKJ) and the purpose of the course is to:

… put the participants through a number of processes, which will sharpen their own methodological reflections in relation to analysis of their qualitative empirical data-material in their phd-research.

I am looking forward to the course, as I am planning to use Situational Analysis in my PhD project and I could definetly use some methodological guiding.

An archive of data September 30, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Dissertation, Ethnography, Methodology, PhD, PhD Data.
2 comments

I am working on the methodology chapter for my dissertation at the moment. Here, I am trying to describe all of my data material, which is a rather tricky affair. As you probably know, I have been using various ethnographic approaches in my PhD project. My engagement and ‘zone of identification’ within the field of youth and online social networking in Denmark is quite strong as I have been entangled in the field since 2004 (both as a researcher, a public speaker, a blogger and as “an expert” in the media).

Therefore, I am trying to incorporate the idea of having an ‘archive of data’. The idea comes from Tim Rapley’s book “Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis“. But where Rapley presents two categories of data, researcher-generated and already existing, I am trying to add a third one: The kind of data that are generated by my own research results.

In this way, my ‘archive of data’ consists of three different types of data material:

  • Data generated by me (such as interviews, open-ended questionnaires, ethnographic observations
    and field rapports)
  • Already existing data (such as newspaper articles about the subject, public debate and discourses etc.)
  • Data generated on the basic of my previous research (such as comments on my blog, reactions on my public talks and articles, newspaper articles with me as a source etc.).

At the moment I am working on building up and describing this archive. One of my main challenges is being able to handle this massive amount of data and to analyse it righteously. But hopefully this division will help me analyse and reflect on my own role as a researcher within the field I am studying.

At the intersection September 18, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Papers.
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In my last post I failed to mention that my AoIR paper presentation is part of an interesting panel called “At the Intersection: Public and Private, Global and Local, Design and Use, Virtual and Textual”, which features papers from some of my good friends and colleagues. In general, we all address some of the following issues:

If we regard the Internet as a place where the boundaries between online and offline identities and activities are increasingly blurred, we can also speak of that place as the space, where strands of otherwise relatively stable dichotomies meet and intersect. In this panel we offer critical perspectives on the above mentioned issues relating to the Internet as intersections and mixed spaces: How do we metaphorically and conceptually grasp mixed spaces? How do we study the mobility and intersecting of people, information and artifacts online? How do the various theoretical framings of mixed spaces influence Internet regulation and use? How can we reach an understanding of the users’ experience of their movements within these mixed spaces? When designing for mixed spaces, how can we integrate and involve the needs of intended users? These and other questions will be discussed, and we attempt to map future challenges in the field.

The presenters and papers are as follows:

Online social networking: From local experiences to global discourses September 11, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Social Networking, Youth Culture.
5 comments

As I am no longer on vacation, it must be time for an update from My PhD Blog.

As I wrote in my last post, I have been working on my paper for this year’s AoiR conference in Copenhagen. The paper is entitled “Online soical networking: From local experiences to global discourses”. It is based on the comprehensive national survey about Danish teenagers’ use of social network sites that I conducted together with The Media Council last year. In the paper I explore the different experiences that young people have through the use of social networking technologies. Those experiences are analysed in relation to the often one-sided public discourses surrounding the subject. Here is an extract from the abstract:

Often, young people do not have a voice in the public debate on internet safety and online social networking, but – as the paper will demonstrate – that does not mean that they do not have an opinion. By examining the responses of 2400 Danish young people to an online open-ended questionnaire dealing with their experiences on social network sites, I demonstrate how young people relate not only to a local context, but also a broader societal level when addressing the issues of online behaviour. In the paper I analyse how young Danes between the age of 12 and 18 – through their statements and responses in the survey – construct themselves as users of social network sites both in relation to very concrete and local online experiences from their everyday life and in relation to a more intangible global level of mediated discourses. Subsequently, I analyse how they construct themselves as ‘responsible young people’ by distancing themselves from the public and “grown up” discourse represented by e.g. their parents, teachers or the media.

I look forward to presenting my ideas about the “local experiences” and “global discourses”, which are based on Ron Scollon’s framework of Geographies of Discourse. Also, I look forward to the AoiR conference in general. The programme looks really interesting.

My paper can be downloaded here.