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Diddling on my computer as Jeff, Dan and kids play Wii.  Thought this was interesting… if you click on the image, you’ll go to the website from whence it came.

I used wordle.net to create a word cloud of my blog.  It lets you put a URL in for analysis, and I was hoping it would be a word cloud of my WHOLE blog (all year and half of it), but no, it’s just a word cloud of the last ten entries (what’s visible now on the site).  Still, it’s kind of cool.  What it does, is take the most frequently occurring words and they appear larger, the less frequent, smaller.

Check out the two largest words: think and work.  Go figure.  But, I’m in my Cincinnati home tonight, so I’m going to take a bit of a break from both of those things and go eat some Doritos.

Today was kind of grand.  It’s Veteran’s day, so classes were canceled.  I spent most of the morning, searching for journal article on video games, so I can write this article I have been putting off for some time.  The thing is, I haven’t had much time this quarter to just peruse for articles and it felt really nice to read a bit here and there and change direction without too much worry that I wasn’t taking everything in.  And, I found some good stuff, and I’m on my way to a good solid outline.

One of the video game articles led me to another on blogs and I started thinking more about my new(er) research project and how I have been wanting to look at danah boyd’s old blog posts for awhile now.  danah is in my study and has been blogging since 1996 (when it wasn’t called blogging).  She’s pretty famous in the the circle of “those who study social networking”, and she writes some great blogs about new ideas in this area.  But, you know, she doesn’t do much personal blogging anymore, so I wanted to go back into her archives and see what she was blogging about when she was in graduate school.  I drifted on over to her blog and just picked August of 1999 to browse through.  And, you know what?  It started sounding pretty familiar.  The tone, the anxiety, the scattered thoughts, the overly personal information (a fair bit of navel-gazing even)… she sounds like me… now.  This kind of gives me hope.  Maybe, once I start to get myself together, I will become more coherent, more confident, more… something better.

For now though, I’m happy using the writing on this blog as a sort of method of inquiry.  Laurel Richardson*, a former OSU professor (and a fantastic writer… and my almost namesake), used the phrase “writing as a method of inquiry” to describe a method of analyzing her research.  As you write, you think, you change your thinking; they are all connected.  So, as I write, I think, I change my thinking, I inquire of myself and I continue to grow, not in a single trajectory, but in a sort of bouncing around from here to there… and hopefully as I continue to think and inquire the bouncing around becomes, not more focused, but less frantic, not narrower, but more deliberate.  I guess I’m striving for a controlled and blissful chaos.

I’m a little behind danah already.   I think those posts from 1999 were in her last year of her undergraduate degree.  She was already doing this sort of writing as a method of inquiry, although on a side note, she went to Brown, which is a heck of a lot more open to inquiring into yourself and life/society than the oh so homogenous Miami University (no disrespect).  But, I wonder where I would be if I had started blogging earlier.  And I think the blogging part is important.  I don’t think it could have just been a journal.  When I put my stuff “out there”, I think just a bit harder than if I weren’t to put it out there.  Of course, I also censor myself a bit more, but that’s part of being thoughtful.  What am I willing to commit to and defend, right at this moment?  That’s a tougher question than, what am I willing to rant about in a journal no one will ever see?

Later in the day, I went to Barnes and Noble to read for a bit and I dug up an old article I had read for my qualitative analysis class that I loved.  It’s by Elizabeth St. Pierre** (one of my advisor’s former students and another brillian woman I admire).  In the article, she talks about how she goes about doing her work.  She brings up Laurel Richardson and writing as a method of inquiry, but she also brings up my newest frenemy, Foucault (!).  She talks of the way that she tries to tear herself from herself as she writes and analyzes the lives of others.  She practices by complexifying rather than essentializing, by having a new experience with each thing she writes, by thinking differently than she has thought as an “ethical imperative” (p. 407).  She also cites my advisor***, who argues that we should “get lost” in this type of work.  Wow.  Scary.  Exciting.  I need to keep trying to do this with myself and my work.  Quite a task.

*Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin (Ed.), Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

**St. Pierre, E. (1998). Circling the text: nomadic writing practices. Communication Abstracts, 21(2).

***Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost : feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany: State University of New York Press. 

Here’s my train of thought… education = the public sphere (schools, standards, Truth), women = the private sphere (or at least have been constructed that way), web 2.0 (blogs) = bringing the private to the public sphere, ergo blogs are a way of feminizing education.  Hmm.  Hold that thought.

Through another blogger, I found these awesome old posters and portraits “livened up” to make it look like the women (and men) in them are blogging.  What does it mean?  I don’t know, but I love it.  Here’s my favorite.  This is how I imagine Vicki when she is blogging:

Sophisticated Blogger

To see the rest on flickr, which were created by Mike Licht, go here.

Also, I wanted to share with you my first blogging triumph.  I will be presenting some of my research at the Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, sometimes called the Bergamo Conference (though I don’t know why).  It’s kind of a big deal, so I’m pretty excited.  Click here to see my name in lights.

I was asked recently if keeping a blog changed me in any way or changed the way I looked at life or did things or something like that.  I had to think for a second about it, but I defininitely think it has.  Throughout the day, I find myself looking at different things as if they were “small moments” (that’s what the LA teachers called them at Heritage) or episodes that I could write about.  This even happens when I’m starting to get upset, like when I got lost on the way to that meeting.  And it allows me to step back a little and think, “this is going to be a good story!”  That always cheers me up.  Another thing that blogging has helped me do is keep a somewhat more positive attitude about life in general.  Every day, when I sit down to write my blog, I might be tired or had a stressful day, but I look for the good in my day because, really, who wants to read about me complaining all the time?  Like today, for instance, you wouldn’t want to hear about how I broke down because I was making such slow progress writing a paper that I started to lose my mind a little (don’t worry, Dan talked me down).  Plus, I really like the little record of my life that is taking shape and I think some day it’s going to be nice to see what I was like when I was 27 or even for my kids to see what I was like.  What I wouldn’t give to have a blog of my Mom’s life in her twenties… Mom, did you ever keep a diary?  And, can I read it?

So after this conversation, I found a blog post from the everyday blogger titled “sometimes life is like one big blog post.” She talks about how she goes everywhere with her camera and her flip, just in case, and she looks at everything as something to blog about.  Then she says, “Sometimes I feel like a sociologist or anthropologist. I’m telling you, 1000 years from now when the historians are trying to figure out how we lived, they’ll be reading lifestyle blogs. Blogs are like the modern day Egyptian hieroglyphics.”  This made me excited because part of what I am studying is sociology and I feel this way all time.  For my class on data analysis right now, I even decided to do a little mini-study on my blog.  It was pretty fun.  Maybe I’ll post it later.  But for now, one question I have is that I wonder if I am really the author of my own blog or even my own life.  What I mean is, do I write this way because this is who I am?  Or, do I write this way because I’ve been socialized in a certain way and society “tells” me that I am basically “allowed” to write about certain topics in a certain way?  So, is my blog a way for me to have a voice in the world, or is it just another manifestation of societal limits on me as a middle class white woman?  Can I even have a voice or is that voice always somehow restricted in some way?  What do you all think?  Do tell.

After work tonight, Dan and I went to our favorite coffee shop to read and drink coffee.  I continued my blog research and read (or skimmed) some really interesting articles.  Vicki commented on my post yesterday about how I think people should use their real names when blogging.  I think she has a point and here’s some food for thought on that topic…

This is from an article on women blogging in Africa:

“It appears that the power of the blog as a tool for empowering women lies in its ability to provide an avenue for women to express themselves and connect with other women. The ability to write anonymously is regarded as an important factor in enabling women to share their experiences and opinions honestly and openly” (p. 483).*

This is from an article on women blogging in Iran:

“Thus many women and youth who write about their personal or private life, as well as those who address political and social issues, do so under a pseudonym or a constructed identity (e.g., a false name and surname). However, the use of pseudonyms is rapidly declining in mainstream sociopolitical blogs, as many such bloggers write under their real name and allow more transparency in order to be more effective politically” (p. 102).**

I think these are both interesting points about anonymity, but I’m not sure how relevant they are to myself as a white American graduate student living a somewhat privileged existence.  However, I still think that American women in academia are navigating in a culture that is more friendly to masculine ways of doing and thinking and that we, too, are looking for increased power.  How much more would I be willing to say if I was using a pseudonym?  Well, probably a lot, and maybe that needs to be said, but who would know I was saying it?  I would just be a nameless, faceless voice, wouldn’t I?

*Somolu, O. (2007). ‘Telling our own stories’: African women blogging for social change. GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT, 15(3), 477-489.

**Amir-Ebrahimi, M. (2008). Transgression in Narration: The Lives of Iranian Women in Cyberspace. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 4(3), 89-115.

I’ve begun my research on blogs and as part of that, I spent a few hours today looking at blogs on blogher.com that were in the catogory “Research, Academia and Education Blogs,” since I decided that I would like to focus on women in grad school that maintain blogs.  There were a lot of blogs and it was mind numbing going through them all.  But after those few hours, I still didn’t find exactly what I was looking for.  So, I decided to make up some rules for blogging, since I like rules (a lot), but I like breaking rules even better so don’t take these too seriously.  They are more like my preferences for blogs…

1) Use your real name.  What’s with all the pseudonyms?  Unless you’re an axe-murderer writing a blog about your axe-murdering, forget the mysterious identity.  Your life is not that exciting.  Just don’t say anything too stupid and you will be fine.  People that read blogs also like reality TV (I just made that up).  It’s the same idea. We want to know who you are.

2) You must have archives.  Holy crap.  You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t have archives!  I was trying to look for people that started blogging before they started grad school (or right as they were starting) and I had to click “older posts” so many times that I gave up.  It’s an easy gadget, just add it!

3) You should blog at least once a week.  If not, it’s not really a blog, it’s more like random posts with no continuity.  If that is the case, start a regular website.

4) Blog about your life.  If you are blogging only about grad school and you post every single day, only about grad school, you are going to go insane.  Tell me about your boyfriend or your kids or your hobbies or something.  (There were’t that many of these, but really, I am worried about them).

5) You need to have a complete profile.  Of course, if you think you are mysterious, then I guess you will have a crappy profile, but people that read blogs want to know about the author.  I’m not taking you out on a date, so don’t be mysterious.  I just want to read your blog… give me some background already.  If you write a post daily, surely you can take a few minutes and add where you’re from and why you are blogging.

6) You should have a blogroll that lists all the blogs you read.  This is how you build community and I think it also says something about the person.  Most people had these and I had fun following the huge chain through the bloggers.

Okay, I think that’s all.  I did come across this quote, though, that is relevant to my faithful readers:

“According to one of the girls in Cadle’s study, “the most fun aspect of blogging is leaving and receiving comments.  I love to know when other people are actually reading my journal, and what they think about it’ (p. 137)” (Bell, p. 104).*

I concur.