Digital Narratives

It's all about you? Celebrating a year of BBC Woman's Hour on Twitter

2011-12-07T03:31:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I got a call from the producer of BBC Woman's Hour, who had read the press release that the University of Leicester recently ran about my new book (Stories and Social Media). Later this month (27th December), BBC Woman's Hour are running an item on Twitter and women. Very exciting!

So the linguist in me couldn't resist taking a peek at the tweets @bbcwomanshour have posted over the last year and seeing how their vital statistics matched up with some of the patterns I've observed in celebrity, corporate and 'ordinary' use of Twitter. And this is what I found:

Followers v. Following:
The profile information for @bbcwomanshour lists 26,354 followers and 2,590. Like celebrities and 'ordinary' Twitter members, there are more followers than those that @bbcwomanshour follows. But the scale of the asymmetry is a ratio 10:1 (followers: following), so closer to the asymmetry that you see on average between 'ordinary' Twitter members (6:1), rather than the disparity on celebrity accounts (60:1).

Types of Tweet:

Like other members of Twitter, @bbcwomanshour use more updates (one-to-many broadcasts) than either directly addressed messages which appear in the public timeline or retweets. Based on the type of tweet, it would seem that @bbcwomanshour is not very conversational.

But that belies the way that @bbcwomanshour seems to be using Twitter, which is not only to promote upcoming features, but to ask the audience for their opinions. If we look more closely at the pronouns that appear in the tweets, the updates use the pronouns 'you' and 'your' (that focus on the audience) far more frequently than 'us', 'our' or 'we' (that focus on the show's producers and presenters). And this difference is especially obvious in @bbcwomanshour if we compare it with the way corporate accounts, celebrities and 'ordinary' members of Twitter talk, and if we compare it with large offline corpora (like the British National Corpus or the Contemporary Concordance of American English).

High frequency words and Hashtags
It's not surprising that the most frequent lexical items that appear in the word list for the @bbcwomanshour tweets are topped by 'tomorrow' (which is usually followed by information about an upcoming feature) and 'women' (which appears three times as frequently as 'men') and signals the main themes that the features address. When we look at the hashtags which are used in tweets we can see that this focus on the show and its featured themes is still present: 8% of all the hashtags used by @bbcwomanshour were directly making the term '#bbcwomanshour' more visible. The choice of hashtags also shows @bbcwomanshour engaging with current events (like #spendingreview, #tubestrikes), but more than anything else (even more than the #ff tag), the hashtags are about food: (#cooktheperfect, #cooking, #recipe, #pasta, #italianfood, #Maryberry and so on).

It's refreshing that @bbcwomanshour are not simply using Twitter to 'broadcast their brand'. Their tweets show engagement with their audience (especially in the use of retweets which forward on audience comments for wider response). And perhaps they hint of the importance that food has for 'women's talk'. Given that I'm married to the wonderful @tobizzy2bake, talking about, making, eating and sharing food has a key place in family life and the friendships that surround our home. All we need now is for a form of virtual #cake that would actually taste good too.

Follow Friday as Self Branding

2011-11-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

As you might know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I've been working on a paper which examines hashtags (#hashtags) in Twitter. The paper is a study of how hashtags are used by corporate, celebrity and 'ordinary' Twitter accounts. Today I've been writing about the 'Follow Friday' tag, and its implications for self branding. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

#FF is the abbreviation for ‘Follow Friday’, a weekly practice whereby Twitter members promote to their follower list the usernames of other members that are deemed worthy of interest. These recommendations are considered a token of esteem that within the linguistic economy of Twitter enhances the visibility and follower list of the nominated members. But while the Follow Friday practice appears in part altruistic, it also manifests subtle forms of self-branding, insofar as it enables the recommending updater to establish their position as an expert, who differentiates the hierarchies of perceived value in Twitter. The list of recommended usernames is one means by which the updater can display their network of contacts, and affirm their bonds within that network, which often (although not always) reflects their professional identity. For example, Selfridges uses #FF to promote fashion designers and magazines, the actor William Shatner’s ‘colleagues and friends’ include other actors and directors, while the lawyer recommended ‘legal industry peeps’.

#ff these legal industry peeps @karasmamedia @markbower @tessashepperson @jamesdunninggeo @brianinkster #law #uklaw

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:10

Follow Friday! #ff @vogue_london @grazia_live @nicolerichie

Selfridges, Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:43

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26:40 +0000 Another #FF for more colleagues and friends @rhettreese @willsasso @christophcarley @ac_field @paulcamuso and one more for @davidzappone

William Shatner, Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26

The #FF tag also appeared with expressions of thanks, which both acknowledges and reaffirms the hashtag as a means of accruing visibility and support.

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40:02 +0000 A BIG thank you to everyone who #FF, RTed & mentioned us over the weekend. We always appreciate your support!

Hoover, Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40

thanks for the #FF love @craigcalcaterra @Jason_IIATMS @fackyouk @BrentSGambill! Traveling, will #FF next week...

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:10

As a form of politeness, thanks imply that the recipient of the ‘Follow Friday’ is in the debt of the recommender. But, at the same time, posting such thanks also builds the reputation of the member by reproducing the recommendation and projecting their identity as someone who is esteemed to be worth following. In some cases, the #FF is explicitly self-promoting, where corporations and celebrities use the practice to advertise their products or outlets, such as the Travel Channel who promoted their new show, Deathwishmovers,

#FF @DeathwishMovers (our new show)

Travel Channel Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:15

Or the actress, Dannii Minogue who recommended the accounts for her fashion line (ProjectD), which sold through the department stores Selfridges and Marks and Spencer, and designed by Tabitha Webb.

#FF @projectdonline @selfridges @marksandspencer @tabswebb

Dannii Minogue, Fri, 14 May 2010 10:29.

What do you think your #FF recommendations say about you? Are they an altruistic attempt to build the reputation of others, or a subtle form of self promotion?

Checklist to be used when planning a new use of social media in HE

2011-09-14T06:01:00.000-07:00

Next week, I'll be giving a presentation as part of the Guardian's Professional Seminar Series. I want to help others think through the planning entailed in using social media to enhance the student experience, and so I've created a check list of questions. Is there anything I've left out?

Resource gathering
• Has anyone else implemented the kinds of change you are planning? What can you learn from their experience?
• Are there any open resources that would be helpful?
• What equipment or software will be needed? Who will maintain/store it?

Training
• How many staff and students will be involved? What are their training needs?
• What help guides might be needed?
• When will you (or someone else) provide training/induction, coaching and practice sessions?

Departmental/Institutional issues
• How does your innovation fit within institutional /departmental policy and practices?
• Which other staff in your department might need to know about your innovation? What mechanisms are there for sharing good practice?
• If your innovation is based at a module level, what are the implications for other modules the students will undertake?
• Will the student work be archived? Available for other students (and others) to see in later years?
• Does your innovation have benefits for other students beyond your course? Are there links to be made with the library/study skills/employability provision?
• Will your use of social media duplicate existing modes of communication (e.g. email, VLE announcements)?
• Will your use of social media be public?

Role of the Tutor
• What will the role of the tutor entail? Providing content? Technical support? Trouble shooting? Moderation?
• Will tutors provide feedback to students? How often? When? How? How long will this take?
• How does the use of social media relate to what is taught in class contact time?
• Is the use of social media assessed? What criteria will be used?
• How will you ensure that students take part?
• How will you help students develop a public profile/voice through your intervention?

General
• What are your measures of success?
• What risks are entailed?
• Does your innovation create any digital divides, and if so, what can you do about it?

Corporate Twitter, interaction and synthetic personalization

2011-07-15T03:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve been extending the analysis of ‘celebrity practice’ in Twitter that forms a chapter in my new book (Stories and Social Media) by comparing the language used in corporate Twitter accounts with the celebrity and ‘ordinary’ datasets that I gathered last year.

(Thanks again to my colleague Philip Shaw for his help with this!)

My analysis has focused on hashtags as identity markers, and today I was doing a more fine-grained (for which read 'manual') analysis of the grammatical contexts in which the most frequently occurring hashtags appear. It won’t surprise you that when the most frequent hashtags from corporate accounts occur with questions and/or imperatives, these projections of interaction are mechanistically reproduced (i.e. it is the exactly the same question that gets reposted numerous times).

I also observed that there were some modified Retweets in the updates with hashtags too, which I argued elsewhere is a form of synthetic personalization (Fairclough 1989): that is, a pseudo-backstage (in Goffman's sense) performance which simulates solidarity, but is more like a mass-media broadcast than peer-to-peer conversational exchanges.

Modified Retweets appeared in the updates from my datasets with the following frequency:

Corporate accounts: 20%

Celebrity accounts: 12%

‘Ordinary’ accounts: 5%

So my question is, why would this happen, or what do these results suggest?
Is it a case that the more ‘branded’ an account is, the greater the need for synthetic personalization?
Are the modified Retweets there to counterbalance (and give a personal voice in contrast to) the mechanistic questions and imperatives that co-occur with hashtagged-tweets in corporate accounts?
Will 'ordinary' accounts employ dyadic interchange (one-to-one conversations) instead of one-to-many broadcasts?

What do you think?

Hashtags and communities of practice

2011-06-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve begun to look at hashtags (#) used in tweets. I’m interested in the way that people use hashtags to signal their membership of wider groups, and so to indicate aspects of their identity.

Hashtags make a tweet searchable, and so visible to others who search for tweets on the same topic. If you search for the hashtag #worldcup2010 you will find all the tweets written about that event, whether or not you follow the people who wrote those messages.

One aspect of the hashtag is that it seems to signal participation in a shared event, for example

• going to a conference: #gurt2011 (Georgetown Roundtable 2011)

• Watching a TV show or mainstream media event: #Lost; #BGT; #worldcup2010

• Supporting a campaign: #foodrevolution, #stoptrafficking

• Commenting on national events: #ge2010 (general election 2010)

But I am not convinced that the use of the hashtag creates a ‘community of practice’ around these events. Although the participants are using the same linguistic repertoire, their tweets are isolated broadcasts and there is no ‘mutual engagement’. There are a lot of people all offering their opinions, but not necessarily engaging with each other (they are just all talking about the same topic, not to each other).

So is there an existing term that describes this aggregating effect, where the talk of an asynchronous and geographically disparate audience coalesces temporarily around a particular event? I know Anstead and O’Loughlin (2010) described this practice as a viewertariat, but I am talking about something wider than this, which mimics a community but is not one. Suggestions?

Using Antconc to search social media data

2011-06-16T06:11:00.000-07:00

In my recent work on Twitter, I've been using the freely available and user-friendly concordancing software, Antconc to search for frequency and collocation patterns in the datasets I've compiled.

On Thursday 23 June, 2011 at 10.am I'll be in the David Wilson Library Cafe, happy to chat about the basics of using Antconc. If you'd like to join me for a coffee and an informal Antconc 101 seminar, you'd be very welcome. Give me a shout on Twitter (@ruthtweetpage if you are coming along!

'Frape' and homosocial solidarity

2011-03-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

This week I have been working on a chapter for my new book. The topic is inauthenticity in social media, and it contains some discussions of Facebook 'rape'. At the outset, I want to say that I know the term is really problematic. When I use the term here I don't want to trivialize debates about rape. But as a shorthand to describe what happens when a third party accesses and publishes inauthentic material on a private Facebook account, I'm keeping it for the time being. Here is a short extract from what I have written this morning. I'm not sure it is going to make it in to the book, as I am reaching over the word count, but here goes:

The inauthentic identities projected through ‘frape’ are often not as innocuous as they might claim to be. , ‘Frape’ often involves projecting sexual identities for the victim. This aspect of ‘fraping’ drew the attention of one of my former students who wrote his term paper on the parodic qualities of ‘frape’ as a means of denaturalizing the mechanics of gender performativity (Butler 2008: 187-188). Here I want to suggest that the gaps made apparent through the incongruous tellability of ‘frape’ are a resource used to position the victim, perpetrator and the ‘knowing’ audience within a shared social identity of heteronormativity.

When ‘frapes’ contain sexually explicit material, they often project a sexual identity for the victim that falls outside conventional representations of heteronormativity. This can range from homosexual activity, bestiality, promiscuity to activity with a woman who doesn’t conform to stereotypical, western standards of sexually attractive appearance (see this site on advice for Facebook 'rape' for examples). Because the implicature of ‘frape’ interprets the locutionary content of the update as untrue, this presupposes the ‘authentic’ identity of the victim to be other than if not opposite to that projected in the ‘frape.’ In other words, when the ‘fraped’ projection is queer in some way, this presupposes the sexual identity of the victim to be heteronormative.

The process of ‘fraping’ thus enables the perpetrator and audience to display homosocial solidarity, and to trivialize identities outside heteronormativity as an out-group of ‘others’ who are really the target of the joke, not the victim at all. The potency of ‘fraping’ is all the more significant, if we consider Facebook as a heterosexual market place where performances of identity are embedded in the circulation of social capital. The value of inauthenticity in this context is dislocated from ontological value and its apparent playful creativity to put to serious heteronormative work.

Susan Herring's plenary at GURT 2011

2011-03-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

I've just got back from GURT 2011. All the plenary speakers gave wonderful talks. To help me reflect on what they said, and to share some of the concepts with those who didn't get to go to GURT, I'm posting some summaries of ideas selected from the notes I took. The first up is Susan Herring, whose inspiring and influential work remains right at the forefront of CMC.

Susan Herring proposed a new concept which she described as Convergent Media CMC or CMCMC. This is defined as: Text based CMC that takes place in convergent media formats in which it is typically secondary, by design, to other information or entertainment-related activities.

CMCMC overlaps strongly with web 2.0, but it raises issues for those of us studying the discourse which emerges in these contexts. These include

• Convergent media CMC discourse and language and language use in CMCMC environments

• Content: tags, updates, annotations

• Contexts: location based SNS, new audiences, localization of SNS

• Usage patterns media co-activity (the use of multiple platforms within one genre)

• Media affordances such as walled gardens, friending, social tagging, recommending, awareness indicators

• Adaptive strategies: e.g. #, @, RTs, performed interactivity (e.g. in blogs)

She proposed a three part lens for approaching this, using the distinction between the qualities which are:

• familiar,

• reconfigured,

• emergent.

These are not simply chronological distinctions, but reflect the complex ways in which genres relate to what has gone before and what is genuinely ‘innovative’. It is inspired by Crowston and Williams’ (2000) classification of reproduced, adapted, and emergent web genres, and reminds of the dangerous tendency to claim newness when there are historical precedents for a form (e.g. blogs, in relation to handwritten diaries).

Examples of different types of reproduced, adapted and emergent web genres include:

• Reproduced – course syllabi, scholarly articles

• Adapted - news sites, geneology sites, e-journals

• Emergent – hot lists of links, homepages, blogs, wikis

There is a trend over time for web genres to shift along a continuum from reproduced to adapted to emergent forms, where older genres appear to become more new over time. For example, the SNS Facebook, comes from the print facebook genre but reworks this in novel ways. This observation is nothing new, and social informatics reminds us that new technologies are first put to old uses until new uses of the technology emerge.

Web 2.0 which is Familiar

Herring argued that media convergence results in qualitatively different text types, but that there are many familiar aspects of web 2.0 discourse that remain current including the study of:

Textuality, interactivity, nonstandard orthography, gender differences, code switching, flaming, email hoaxes/scams, etc.

She reminded us that familiar phenomenon are often overlooked in favour of newer, more exotic forms of CMD and that the ‘innovations’ may be mistaken for new, or assumed to be different by virtue by virtue of the passing of time. When we study web 2.0 we need to trace relevant antecedents to gain perspective.

Web 2.0 is Reconfigured

Reconfigured genres include:

Personal status updates, quoting, retweeting, small stories, ad spam,

For example, Facebook updates not innovative forms which emerged out of the blue. Rather they date back to emotes in MUDS and MOOS (Cherny 1999). But in Facebook the updates are reconfigured as core content, not peripheral, and presented as threads in a multimodal site. Reconfigured phenomena can be tricky to identify as they can be mistaken for emergent CMD. In order to see that the genres are reconfigured, the analyst must apply comparative insight, comparing the functions of one genre with another

Web 2.0 which is Emergent

Emergent web 2.0 has no antecedents. Examples include authorless discourse (e.g. wikis), Multimodal UGC (voicethread) video blogging and exchanges (you tube), computerised programs for forum posters (link builders).

In summary, Herring argued that some apparently new phenomenon have online or offline antecedents, and as analysts we need to be aware of these. We should then question why certain discourse phenomenon persist, adapt, or arise anew in technologically mediated environments. She contrasted the influence of technological, social and linguistic factors, arguing that interaction seems most likely to be reconfigured, so while social identities are already formed, the format for turn taking structures can change. We might find new formats for online talk (in Retweets, updates voice over threads) but the gendered styles for example, might stay the same.

Becoming 'resident' in twitter: acquiring the language

2011-03-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I was talking to Alan Cann (@ajcann) about digital skills for new academics. He pointed me in the direction of David White’s distinction between digital residents, who integrate social media with their personal and professional life, and digital visitors who go online to carry out specific, selected tasks and then log off again. To exemplify his point, Alan pointed out that I was resident in Facebook but a visitor in Twitter. It’s a good job he didn’t look at this blog, or he might have concluded that I had moved out.

But this made me think about my use of Twitter, which really has been only visitor-like, but has begun to migrate more towards the behaviour of a resident this week. One way I recognise this is the changing ways which I have begun to use the conventions of Twitter talk.

Twitter talk for aliens: unintelligible life signs

Before using Twitter, the timelines on a Twitter profile looked like gobbledygook to me. I could not make sense of what anyone was saying at all, or who they were saying it too. This is not the stance of a visitor, this is viewing Twitter as an alien discourse.

Twitter talk for tourists: recognising the road signs

I started my Twitter account (@ruthtweetpage) months ago, but didn’t use it, even though I began to understand the difference between updates, direct messages, hash tags to signal topic threads and @messages to indicate a user’s name. This was largely due to reading the work of danah boyd, Susan Herring and their colleagues. This is a crash course in Twitter talk for tourism purposes (you look from the outside but don’t join in, just like being on holiday and only being able to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘hello’ in the native language.)

Twitter talk 101: updates, links and questions

I actually began to send a few tweets now and again. I knew how to post an update, even how to add a link shortened through a site like tinyurl. I made it as far as asking questions. But then I felt a bit put off, because it seemed like no one answered. I figured I had no friends on Twitter, or it was just a really dumb question I had asked. It felt a bit like being an undergraduate who was not really sure how to contribute to a discussion in a conference plenary session.

Twitter conversations: connecting with the @ symbol

And then I realised that if you want to see what people say back to you in Twitter, you have to click on the @mentions tab. This is where you will find the public replies people send you (as opposed to Direct Messages). And there were the answers to my questions – doh! And suddenly I felt very bad that I had not said thank you, so I posted some tweets doing just that. Then I realised that using the @username was a good way to demonstrate your network of connections and to get your own name circulated in the twitterverse. I’m starting to get a little more proficient in this now, to the point where I instinctively want to use my colleagues’ twitter names than their institutional email addresses.

Advanced Twitter: modifying Retweets and hashtags

I gave a paper last week on celebrity practice in Twitter to the School of Media where I work. One of the members of the audience (@Flygirltwo) asked me if I had searched for hashtags in my dataset, as this was a good way of promoting topics by making them searchable. I hadn’t and I realised that I haven’t started to do this yet. Clearly this is a step in Twitter literacy beyond my current level of fluency. Likewise, modifying Retweets (forwarded tweets). I know it is possible to add a comment to a Retweeted message by editing it, but can I work out how to do this? Not yet. If you could explain it to me, I would be very grateful. Then send me a tweet so I can practice and let you know that I’ve read your tweet talk. And maybe I might move a little bit further towards residency in Twitter rather than being an occasional visitor.

Narrative Interactions: Sagadi

2010-10-15T03:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Sagadi, Estonia, teaching a graduate seminar for the Nordic Narrative Network. It was a great experience, and made me think a lot about the value of connecting different streams of narrative research, but also how difficult it sometimes is to bridge the gap between literary-critical v. sociolingiustic perspectives.

I spent some time debating the importance of contextualism in relation to unnatural narratives with my good friend, Jan Alber. For me, the reader's frames of reference and their cultural situation precede their interpretation to define a scenario as 'unnatural' or not, at least when this moves beyond concrete examples of logical impossibility. And the cultural differences in interpretation strike me as something that would be interesting to explore too. But I'm not convinced that literary narratologists would see things the same way. Does that matter? What do you think?

Literacy in the Digital University

2010-10-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Today I have attended the ESRC seminar for Literacy in the Digital University. There were many interesting presentations, including an excellent talk by Eszter Hargittai. I will be really interested to read some of the work she's published about the demographics of digital skills and their perceived impact on student behaviour. I also came away thinking about the post-human nature of the some of the storytelling I've been analysing: specifically the hybrid way that the machine templates intersect with human generated text to tell our stories in tweet and update streams.

I also need to resurrect my twitter account, having promised to do so at 7.25 this morning, live on air for BBC Radio Leicester. But Twitter is too busy right now, so that will have to wait for another day.

To tweet or not to tweet

2010-10-13T02:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the University of Leicester released some of the findings of my celebrity twitter research and there has been a small flurry of interest from the online world. For someone who writes a blog (albeit intermittantly) I find myself wondering why I now find myself flipping between feeling slightly unnerved and slightly excited. Maybe it's because I don't think many people will actually read my blog! Maybe because I find myself placing my research alongside rather more weighty issues like the Browne report and the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Some of the questions I've been asked are:
Do I think the celebrities are consciously self promoting and disguising this with conversational engagement?
Well, I'm not inside their heads, and I don't think Twitter is a way of seeing inside their heads either, despite what the Guardian might suggest. But if we can infer anything about people's identity from their discourse style, then we can say that celebrities are the example par excellence of how to amplify your identity in twitter.

Who are the worst offenders?
In my sample, the distribution between promoting shows and personal self disclosure was evenly distributed across the different personalities, but there were some celebrities who never disclosed anything personal (like Boris Johnson and Arnold Schwarzenegger). It depends on whether you see the personal disclosure as good or bad as to whether you think their practice is something negative.

Who was the most interesting tweeter to read?
I enjoyed Sarah Brown the most, Andy Murray the least.

Do I tweet?
Well, that would be a 'no', despite having a twitter account (ruthtweetpage). Maybe I just can't squeeze what I want to say into 140 characters!

Summary of Celebrity Twitter Study

2010-10-11T06:23:00.000-07:00

Hi there, after the summer break here is a summary of the main findings from the study of celebrity tweet streams I was working on earlier this year. There is more detail on the stats in the post just below, but here I'm reflecting on the possible relevance of the findings too:

Main findings:

1. Celebrities favour a 1-to-many form of broadcasting in twitter, not peer-to-peer messaging

2. The majority of celebrity tweets are about their professional activity, not the ‘everyday’ domestic lives.

3. The immediacy of celebrity tweeting is used to prioritise shows or products (shown in collocational patterns for ‘today’, ‘tonight’ and ‘tomorrow’, which associate with ‘on the show’)

4. Like other tweeters, the links celebrities share in their tweets boost their professional status, but they share more photographs which literally increases their online image.

5. Celebrities cover over this self-promotion with a veneer of conversational strategy, telling jokes, praising and thanking their audience, asking questions, making positive evaluations.

6. Women celebrities make positive evaluations in RTs more than men, especially Dannii Minogue and Demi Moore.

What’s the point?

Mainstream media sensationalise celebrity tweets as giving direct access to the ‘real person’, e.g. the Guardian’s recent piece on ‘seeing into the brain’ of the musician 50 cents, but in fact, most celebrities aren’t using twitter for personal self-disclosure. We don't find out much about the celebrity themselves, let alone see 'into their brain'.

Twitter self-promotion for celebrities doesn’t necessarily result in influence. A recent study from Northwestern University showed that specialist knowledge about areas of professional expertise was more important in trending topics than the number of followers or retweets gained by a celebrity.

Substance over style is more important for influence in Twitter. This is the opposite of what happens in Facebook where seemingly trivial disclosures are important for the ‘social grooming’ work that this small talk achieves.

Celebrity twitter research - key findings so far

2010-07-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

My word, time flies when you are having fun, doesn't it? Or at least when you are immersed in reading, sifting, counting tweets....though I am not sure that has always felt like fun in the last few weeks!

In my attempts to be thorough, I feel as if I have enough data for a book on twitter, not just a chapter. And I also feel that I have sometimes spent a long time working through data to find a small and seemingly insignificant result. Though I will let you be the judge of the significance. Here are some of the facts and figures that are working their way into my chapter:

Celebrities have many more followers than people they are following. In fact, their audience (the followers) is 60 times the number of people they are interested in following. Compare this with the difference for the non-celebrities in my dataset, where the audience is only 1.5 times the size of those they are following in return.

Celebrities favour one-to-many twitter updates rather than one-to-one direct messages. 63% of the celebrity tweets were updates, 32% direct messages. Compare that with the non-celebrity twitter behaviour, where 48% of tweets were updates and 42% direct messages.

Although the media sensationalise occasions where celebrities post details about their private life on twitter (remember Ashton Kutcher's photo of Demi Moore?), the majority of tweets are about the celebrities' professional activities: 75% in fact, and that's the same whether the celebrity is male or female.

Celebrity tweeters post links more frequently than non-celebrities do. In my dataset, 27% of the celebrity tweets contained links compared with 19% of the non-celebrities. Of those links, 26% of the celebrity set were to photographs, only 8% of the non-celebrity links did this. Other links for the celebrities were to their own webpages, blogs, products, movie trailers, mainstream news in which they were mentioned. In other words, the higher number of links represents a means of amplifying celebrity identity and boosting their status as an 'elite person' (Fowler 1996).

Perhaps no surprises in any of this. But there is an increasing case which shows that the celebrities on twitter are functioning as information sources (about themselves), not trying to be your 'friend' (Huberman 2009). So forget finding out what Stephen Fry or Oprah are having for breakfast - it's a clever promotional strategy designed to boost mainstream celebrity industry.

Celebrity Twitter

2010-06-09T04:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve started work on a new phase of analysis: looking at how celebrities use twitter to construct their identities and a sense of engagement with their audiences. I’ve taken the most recent 1000 tweets from 30 celebrities (15 female, 15 male; half from the UK and half from the US). I’ve separated updating tweets from retweets and direct addresses to other twitter users, leaving me with around 14 000 updates to analyse.

My first round of analysis is to note whether the tweet is a report of an event (or even a series of events), gives the tweeter’s evaluation, asks a question or directs the audience to do something. I haven’t collated the results yet, as I have only just finished this first round of marking up the data, and just for the male celebrities. But I’m already noticing a number of interesting features including:

The use of deixis to suggest close proximity to the speaker (e.g. here, this, now, just, about to)

The use of pronouns to suggest inclusion (e.g. we, our, you)

The use of ‘affective’ or ‘interpersonal’ markers (e.g. emoticons, kisses, laughter)

A great deal of variation in terms of how much personal information (e.g. references to home life and family) compared with professional information (e.g. references to working life) or mainstream media (sports events, television programmes) are contained in the tweets. So Jonathan Ross, Jamie Oliver and Philip Schofield all talk about time and meals spent with their family while Boris Johnson, William Shatner and Arnold Schwarzenegger do not.

Lots of questions that could be asked about this, in terms of what difference this might make, why it is relevant (or not), what effect the twitter discourse has on actual public perception of these figures and audience engagement with their various projects. But for now, I need to do some more work on the textual analysis and will post more here when I've got a bit further.

Implied authors and collaborative fiction

2010-05-25T06:20:00.000-07:00

This week I have been working on revising the conference paper I gave on collaborative fiction. Here's a few paragraphs where I reflect on the relationship between implied and historical authors and fiction:

The distinction between actual and implied authors is complicated by the online environment of the collaborative projects I'm examining. In narrative theory, the implied author is understood as a reading effect rather than a core role in narrative transmission (Toolan 2001:66), an anthropomorphised figure who may be quite distinct the historical author. The notional nature of the implied author has generated considerable controversy in narrative theory (summarised in Nunning 2005), but as Toolan goes on to point out, “the pictures we have of authors are always constructions, so that all authors are, if you like, ‘inferred authors’” (ibid). Indeed, the vagaries of online representation might tempt us to abandon the project of recovering historical authors for collaborative projects at all.

Both A Million Penguins and Protagonize offer the contributors the opportunity to represent themselves in a profile page. In Protagonize, the profiles follow a standard template where contributors supply an image, user name and information about themselves (which might include where they live, how long they have been writing and so on). Individual contributors vary in the degree of self-disclosure they employ, for example in whether to use a mimetic photograph (or not), a pseudonym or real name. How far a reader might build a biographical picture of the historical author from these paratexts can vary in precision, and the offline accuracy of any such picture cannot be determined from the online materials at all. The blurring of online and fictional identities is all the more exacerbated in the case of Free Your Mind. Contributors were invited to write their Protagonize identities into the story, which is constructed as a metafictional role playing adventure where the Protagonizers are a literary society that functions as a resistance movement. The characters in the storyworld bear the same names as the story contributors and some of the attributes derived from the user profiles, attributes that could be later carried over into playful discussions in the commentary.

In contrast, the user profiles for A Million Penguins were more or less devoid of mimetic information about the contributor’s offline identities. Like all the wiki pages, user pages could be edited by anyone, not just the writer themselves. Profiles of the story contributors were sometimes reconstructed (sometimes maliciously) by other writers. A case in point is the contributor named Pabruce. On 3 February 2007, Pabruce wrote a brief self description for his profile which linked to a myspace page for Paul Allen Bruce:

pabruce, aka "bruce the fierce", aka uncle paul singer songwriter, construction worker, marble collector see examples:

But this description was soon deleted and replaced by another contributor, Kate Fyne, who wrote an alternative profile for pabruce:

May or may not own a piano. Well known as being a pretty cool guy. Suspected Communist.

Before Pabruce finally deleted Kate Fynn’s alternative a week later, he inserted dialogic commentary around her text, indicating willing acceptance for multiple versions of his authorial persona to be constructed. But while Pabruce might have tolerated, if not played along with other people authoring his persona at this level, he deeply objected to his persona being treated as a fictional entity within the narrative pages of the wiki, or as Mason and Bruce put it “just another wiki character” (2008:5). When another contributor wrote a version of Pabruce into the wikinovel, Pabruce responded by leaving the project, stating that “Going to my myspace page and entering a thinly veiled version of my name INTO the novel is too wierd.” While the complex relationship between offline, online and fictional representation mean that implied authors remain a useful heuristic, we should not forget that beyond the narrative discourse, historic authors continue to exist and may feel strongly about their authorial identity.

Resurrection

2010-05-18T07:58:00.001-07:00

Well, after a long, long time of not being a blogger, I have resurrected my Digital Narratives blog.

Reasons for the long, long time of not posting anything? Put that down to the crazily busy life I had as Programme Director for the BA English programmes at Birmingham City University. There were some great projects that I got involved in between February of last year and the present time - such as the Digital Spaces module we taught all our new first year undergraduates, and which I talked about at a recent English Subject Centre event on Digital Writing. But posting about how many emails I managed to get answered (or not) and how much research I was only slowly getting done (or not) just kept falling off the bottom of my 'to do' list.

Reasons for the resurrection? Well, I have a new job at the University of Leicester. I was genuinely sad to say goodbye to my many good friends at BCU, but after 13 years in post it was time to move on. And I am genuinely excited about the opportunities my new job holds, not least because of the time I now have to get on with some of the slowly languishing research. And I might even get time to blog about some of it.

So, some of the things I have been up to since finishing at BCU:
Revising my essay on small stories and status updates in Facebook - it will be coming out in Text and Talk very soon. I gave a version of this at the University of Sussex last month.
Presenting my work on collaborative storytelling (Protagonize and A Million Penguins) at the ISSN conference.
Writing an essay on Girl with a One Track Mind for the Journal of Literary Theory, which will form the basis of the keynote I'll be giving in Genoa later in the summer. Still working on getting over the flush factor in discussing the grammatical patterns of "shag" and "fuck" compared with "having sex". Writing this on the train on my way to and from Leicester has been interesting - especially when I nearly forgot to get off the train as I was so engrossed!

What I'm up to next is a wider analysis of the stories that get told in social media of various kinds. It's going to have to be Twitter next. And I am not sure I really 'get' Twitter yet. I have an account there too, so the resurrection will have to spread further, methinks! But if you have any tips for harvesting data from Twitter, or even just making sense of the tweets, let me know!

2009-02-26T08:04:00.000-08:00

I've been battling with trying to get a handle on the temporality of status updates in Facebook. My ideas are still pretty rough around the edges, but I'm posting them here in the hope that some of the narrative / new media scholars and philosophers will give me some feedback and help me hone the ideas. Special thanks to Amy Elias for making me go and read some phenomenology and Joe Baker for pointing me to Ricouer's work on cosmic time. Anyway, here goes...

The temporality of the status updates operates on a number of levels. Against the backdrop of a-personal cosmic time, the writer’s status updates can be seen in Ricouer’s terms as an attempt to ‘make time human’ (1984:52) by selecting particular events as worthy of narration while other material is not. However, the human time depicted in the updates themselves is far from a linear string of dates. Rather, as Ochs and Capps put it, human time is ‘sensed holistically’ (2001:157) where the past and future are brought to bear on the present moment.

We might interpret the significance of the ‘pull of the present’ in terms of the particular context created by the social network. At one level, the significant of the present moment in status updates might be interpreted simply as a result of the immediate discourse situation. The prompt for the status update after all, asks the writer what they are doing ‘right now’, not what they were doing at some point earlier in their life. As such, the stories in the status updates are a far cry from the canonical examples so influential in work on life story (Linde 1993) or narratives of personal experience (Labov 1972) where the speaker is narrating past events that have since been completed, and are usually retrospectively distant from the present moment. The significance of what is happening ‘right now’ to a writer is clearly appropriate to the technology of Facebook, which is driven by the RSS feeds that promote recency as a driving organizational force.

Returning to the Chronotope of the status update, we are reminded that FB is not a collection of updates that exist in isolation to each other. Instead, there are two parameters (the time of the individual's narrative and the space of the social network) where updates are distributed across and form intersections in the social network of Friends. Within the framework of Newtonian time imprinted by the Facebook timestamp, a framework which is linear and unidirectional, the present moments narrated in the status update construct an elastic temporality that generates a sense of ongoing-ness that transcends objective measurement. Hermeneutic approaches to time are useful here. Drawing on Heidegger’s (1962) concept of Dasein, time is not defined in individual terms, but profoundly contextualised by living with others. Status updates are an apt vehicle for realising this idea, for they project an illusion of a present moment that carries beyond its point of articulation (it remains in the archive for longer than the moment it is written) and which is instantaneously shared with all others in the Friendship network. The effect of this ongoing present is one of intimacy, “through mutual embracing of the temporal context (Dasein) we come to understand one another and our own being as well” (Bennett 2000:13). The present tense quality of the status updates’ narrative is not just one that humanizes time (Ricouer) but also is inextricably linked to the social dimension of human reality.

Status updates, narrative beginnings and chronotopes

2009-02-25T00:53:00.000-08:00

The social network of Facebook complicates locating the beginning of the sequence of status updates. Walker Rettberg points out that blogs are dominated by the present tense, supported by technology that prioritizes the new (2008: 65). Status updates share a similar focus on recency, as writers respond to the question of what they are doing ‘right now’. Like email in-boxes and blogs, status updates appear in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent activity appears at the top of the list the reader encounters when opening their profile. If the reader wants to reconstruct the updates in the chronological sequence in which they were posted, they have to visit the writer’s profile page, extract the status stories from the archive of wall interaction and read backwards from the furthest point in the list. So the sequence of status updates has at least two points of inception: the assumed chronological beginning of the events which are posted about, or the position of the most recent update.

In addition, unlike blogs and email in-boxes which build a single archive of an individual’s interactions, when status updates are posted, they appear not only on the writer’s profile but also distributed via RSS feeds into each of their Friends’ profiles. Individual status updates are thus simultaneously positioned in multiple sequences which we might explain using Bakhtin’s concept of the Chronotope (1966). The Chronotope plots two intersecting parameters: the time and space of a narrative. Here I am re-appropriating this matrix to plot the sequence of status updates that appears in the writer’s profile against the sequence of updates that appear in the Friends’ news feed page. Heuristically, we might think of the first of these as the ‘narrative of the individual’ – the series of their life experiences documented in status updates, which intersects with the ‘narrative of the social network’ – the sequence of all Facebook activity constructed by the RSS technology into a single temporal series. The status update ‘knots together’ the life documentation of the individual with that of their community in the social network as a point of intersection between the writer’s profile and its distribution across the online context. So, not only does the position of the initial update continuously change relative to subsequent facebook activity (it will move further down the archive as new activity supersedes it in recency), it also changes relative to the newsfeed that it is being distributed into across the network. For the narrative of the network is not a homogenous entity but a composite mass constructed from the profiles of potential hundreds of Friends. What this means is that it becomes very difficult to think of the series of status updates as a single chronological thread, with a unique starting point and unified trajectory. Instead, the position of any given status update will occur in potentially hundreds of combinations within the space of the online community.

Facebook's Lexicon

2009-02-24T04:58:00.000-08:00

My PhD student, Allison Martin gave me a link to Facebook's new Lexicon http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/, which looks like a very interesting tool for analysis of the language on Facebook. I can't wait until it goes live so that I can test out some of the topics that occurred in my data sample. And oh my goodness, how annoying that I have categorised the 2000 updates in my sample according to topic already. At least I'll be able to compare the demographic variation with a wider sample now!

Hating Facebook?

2009-02-22T06:51:00.000-08:00

Why is it that people hate Facebook so much? The fifth anniversary of the website has been met with acerbic tirades, like that from Janet Street Porter last week in her Daily Mail article ‘Why I hate Facebook’. You don’t have to know very much about social networking sites to read Street Porter’s article and just feel plain irritated with the lack of decent research that has gone into her essay (compare it instead with the much more informed and for that reason if nothing else more interesting NY Times article on Digital Intimacy by Clive Thompson). For example, one of Street Porter’s key objections is that virtual relationships are not ‘real’, and connect ‘strangers’. She says: They [social networking sites] are pernicious because they delude users into thinking they are experiencing and managing real relationships, when in truth they are connecting with a gang of people - often strangers - tapping away to each other in cyber-space.
She clearly hasn’t looked at the empirical research that points out that the dynamic between ‘Friends’ in Facebook (not other sites) is that users primarily use the site to connect with those they already know from the offline world, and use this to generate benefits in social capital (Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe 2006) that feed into those offline friendships that she rightly points out are so important.
Now, I’m not saying that Facebook is without controversy – it clearly is, for lots of very good reasons. But if you’re going to write in a public forum about the dangers of social networking, it is better to make sense of what exactly the gains and losses of sites like Facebook are in relation to more than a personalised, anecdotal response.

Episodic nature of Status Updates and Temporality

2009-02-20T07:39:00.000-08:00

I've started drafting my first thoughts on a paper about the Status Updates in Facebook and how/why we might consider them to be narratives. Over the next weeks I'll be posting portions of the draft essay here, and would be very grateful if you'd give me some feedback! Without more ado, here is a chunk of today's writing....

The autobiography that emerges from the status updates, like narratives told on blog posts and discussion forums is episodic. This has (at least) two implications for narrative structure. First, the story content unfolds via small fragments of text, each of which makes sense on its own. As Walker Rettberg (2008) points out, this style of episodic writing is particularly suited to the demands of reading a screen (as opposed to a print page). As the reader pieces together their ‘mental image’ of the story, they do not necessarily rely on the story content being delivered in adjacent textual episodes. In some senses, this is no different to postmodern print fiction, nor to the dispersed stories in conversation that Norrick (2006) describes. Nonetheless it draws our attention to the limitations of minimal definitions like Labov’s: stories do not have to be told in strict chronological sequence to be recognised as such, readers seem remarkably competent at ‘filling in the gaps’ to build a storyworld.
The sequence in which the episodic fragments (updates) appear prioritizes recency over the conventional chronology. That is, the readers will see the update which has been written most recently first, and if they wish to read the events in the order in which they occurred, they will have to retrieve earlier posts from the archive of updates on the writer’s homepage. The time of narration becomes all important, constructed as an ongoing moment of ‘now’ through the typical use of present continuous tense. No doubt this results in part from the default template of the status update which asks ‘What are you doing right now?’ to which the individual can add to the prompt ‘X is….’. The appearance of the updates thus unfolds in keeping with the temporality of life experience, rather than narrating the life experience retrospectively as a complete and coherent whole. This also alters the reader’s expectation of narrative closure. While Peter Brooks (1984) has argued that readerly anticipation of an ending drives plot dynamics, the serial nature of status updates (like blog posts and other forms of serial web writing) is somewhat different. As Walker Rettberg puts it, ‘The blog reader hopes there is no end’ (2008:118), and I would argue that the same is true for status updates. If the status updates finish, this doesn’t provide a sense of teleological closure, but more likely a sense of disconnection between the writer and reader.
The illusion of a ongoing ‘now’ of narration through the present continuous tense used in the status update counterbalances the asynchronous nature of interaction between status writer and reader, for the audience may not receive or respond to the update at the present moment at which it is posted. Instead, the reception of the status update occurs at the later moment that the viewer is also online, and will appear in the viewer’s news feed relative to all the other Facebook activity generated by others in the Friends’ community. Although the status updates are in one sense highly ephemeral, always transitioning through the fluctuations of the updates in the Facebook RSS feeds, they are also retrievable. It is this capacity to retrieve and reassemble the story material from the updates in those feeds that fosters the critical sense of continuity and connection that is so important for understanding the potential of Status Updates as stories more fully.

Barbie in the news

2009-02-19T04:45:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a recent news article on young girls' reactions to Barbie that was forwarded on the IGALA listserv today. I have to confess I finally let my daughter have Barbie dolls bought for her when she was four - they too are sitting in a plastic box, long neglected - although not tortured. And Bratz dolls have been completely banned from our house.

Trivia and Tellability: Status updates again

2009-02-17T07:42:00.000-08:00

One element of my Facebook Status Update analysis is to chart the kinds of topics that individuals self disclose about. I’ve compiled the data, but not quantified it in detail yet. One thing is clear, though. Most of the time, the status updates in the data sample I'm looking at are about pretty much every day events. They are a far cry from the landmark, traumatic events narrated in ‘danger of death’ personal narratives (Labov 1972). That’s not to say that the status update material is not selective – it clearly is, otherwise the individuals would be filling their updates with material constantly (and they don’t – even the most prolific updaters don’t update more than a few times a day). However, the updates are often related to trivial, ephemeral issues: ‘Ruth is eating banana on toast’ (or I was this morning, and contemplated putting it in my status update).

The questions I now find myself asking are:
Why are status updates usually about trivial topics?
What does this tell us about narrative?

My thoughts so far in response are:

People don’t necessarily choose to update about everyday, ‘lightweight’ topics because their ‘actual’ lives are necessarily like that. Could it be that the status updates are working as a form of phatic communication (Malinowski 1922)? Are they a kind of ‘online grooming’ or small talk functioning as a gesture towards a social tie? After all, Fred Wilson just lately described status as the ‘ultimate social gesture’

But perhaps it is also possible that the impact of networked publics (boyd 2008) means that self disclosure of a profoundly emotive or personal kind can be risky in a context where the divisions between separate offline subgroups of your network are collapsed into one? So, on a personal note, I try not to disclose anything in my status updates that I wouldn’t be prepared to say in front of a class of my students. That means that sometimes I really have to hold back on what I want to say (maybe that is a good thing). So taking this further, is the lightweight nature of the status update an attempt to reduce the level of self disclosure to as low risk a common denominator as possible?

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t devalue what is happening with the status updates – after all, Georgakopoulou’s (2007) discussion of Small Stories stresses that these fragmentary, ephemeral snatches of narrative are crucial for recognising the generic variability of stories that fall outside the narrative canon. So in answer to my question (2), one of the things that Status stories makes us take account of is the range of storytelling possibilities that have yet to be systematically accounted for, and just how very selected and crafted conversational narratives (let alone literary stories) are.

Status Updates as Storytelling?

2009-02-16T05:18:00.000-08:00

In my work on Facebook, I am trying to make sense of the Status Updates in Facebook. Can we consider them to be a form of story? If we take classical definitions of narrative as reports of events that happened in the past, where those events are ordered in a time sequence, usually with a marked change in state and a ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure, then Status Updates seem not to fit the bill. After all, status updates:
(1) Do not necessarily report events that happened in the past. They can be the ‘breaking news’ situated in the present or project future events yet to happen.
(2) Although Status slots are updated chronologically, the events in them need not be causally or thematically linked other than that they are mediated through the consciousness of the Facebook updater.
(3) Status updates are episodic in nature, so are part of an ongoing pattern of online interaction without a defined beginning, middle and end. They are spatially fragmented, without clearly defined boundaries as they are distributed across the RSS feeds into Friends’ profiles.
(4) They tend to be low in tellability, often equated with low narrativity.
So why do I keep wanting to treat them as narratives? Here are my initial reasons:
(1) When collated, they form a chronicle of ‘updates’ that unfold over time, forming a constellation of micro-episodes of the user’s life-story. As such, they seem to be related both to online impression management, autobiography and narrative as an entry point into identity analysis.
(2) At micro-level they can contain narrative-like elements. These include both temporally ordered events and evaluation of those events.
(3) They call into question the idea of ‘tellability’, both because of the kinds of topics people update about (typically mundane/everyday) and because the updates themselves often make use of what Labov calls ‘evaluation’ markers.
So clearly, the Status Updates are outside the narrative canon (both spoken, literary and online), but might well be a useful way of reflecting on (and maybe even reworking) our narrative vocabulary. The frameworks I am using draw heavily on Georgakopoulou’s (2007) work on Bamberg's concept of Small Stories, together with Jill Walker's ideas about distributed narratives and sociolinguistic work in CMC. There’ll be more to come as I try and figure out my ideas. But let me know if you have any useful leads.

Taken out of context

2009-02-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

I've spent most of today reading danah boyd's excellent Ph.D dissertation: Taken Out of Context. An excellent study of social networking sites and teen identity. It's given me lots to think about for my own Facebook project.

Facebook - interaction profiles

2009-02-09T03:55:00.000-08:00

Finally got around to writing something here, as I am at last working on something new rather than tidying up loose ends on edited collections / chasing administration in the office! Well, the 'new thing' is looking at the narrative potential of Facebook, with a particular focus on status updates. The work I'm doing is extending both Georgakopoulou's work on 'small stories' and the Labovian concept of evaluation to the fragments of life stories that get posted in status updates.

As usual, I'm interested in how status updates and the interactional patterns they generate (formerly on wall posts, now in comments) vary according to age and gender. So I have a data sample of 100 people, ranging from teenagers up to 40-somethings, split equally between men and women, and I've been comparing their profiles and status updates in particular. More work will follow on the micro-detail of the status updates themselves (what storyworlds are constructucted, topics, evaluation markers etc.), but just this morning I finished a rough and ready quantitative comparison of photo sharing, amount of self disclosure in personal profiles and status updates. The figures I am quoting obviously are not hugely representative (you can find more data like that in data-analytic posts). So here's what I've got so far:

On average across all age categories, the men tended to have slightly more friends (128 per person) than the the women (113 friends per person)
On average across all age categories, men have less photos of themselves on their profiles (40 / profile) than the women (94 / profile), and use less words in their personal profile (59 words / profile) than the women (78 words / profile).
And surprise surprise, women wrote more status updates over a two-month period (12 status updates / profile) than the men did too (7 updates / profile).

Obviously, there is a lot more work to be done here, disaggregating the scores according to the age band; qualitative analysis of the updates; comparing this with interactional data; beginning to interpret all of this. But it is an interesting start point. Clearly, it is not the number of friends that you have on Facebook that influences your interaction with them via your status updates. More to come!

Facebook as a pre-induction support tool

2008-12-01T06:39:00.001-08:00

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will know that we trialled using Facebook to support induction for our new undergraduate intake this year. It was definitely a positive experience, and now some two months later, I've had a chance to take stock, do some analysis and reflect on what it was good for (or not).
The group had a pretty good intake (80 out of 120 new students), but it's more interesting to look at the actual patterns of participation. Of the 80 students who joined the group, 39 of them actively contributed to the discussions (either writing on the wall or starting a discussion thread). Of those 39 students,

59% wrote one post only
31% wrote 5 or less wall posts
8% wrote 10 or less wall posts
2% wrote more than 10 wall posts.

This works out roughly at a participation ratio of 30 - 15 - 4 - 1, a bit more encouraging than Reilly's 90-9-1 predictions. And of course, this doesn't reflect the emails that students were sending each other - only the public communication on the group itself.
The topics that they wrote about were a good indication of what the students used the group for: getting specific information about what was needed for the start of term and introducing themselves to each other. The most frequent topics (those with 10 posts or more on the wall) were about:

purchasing books
reading lists
greeting/introduction
accommodation
timetable
routeway choices

So what can we learn from this? Well, I will ensure that all the information going out to new students has even clearer instructions about where students can buy their books and what they need to read in which order, and I'll be adding a FAQ sheet to our joining instructions to give them the information as soon as they have their results and an offer confirmed from us.

My next plans? I'm toying with the idea of starting a group for our current first years and final years to talk to prospective students as a way of enhancing the visit days. And in the meantime, I'll be talking about this to delegates at the ESC event Encouraging Student Interaction Online in January, and Legal and General have even been interested the research as a means of supporting their new starters! I'm delighted, too that the work we have done will be published as a JISC study in the use of social software.

Feminist Myths and Michelle Obama

2008-11-09T02:02:00.000-08:00

More than 10 years ago, Bing and Bergvall posed the following challenge: ‘Why are questions that strengthen the female-male dichotomy so frequently asked, while those that explore other types of variation evoke much less interest?’ (1996:3). While assumptions of binary difference between all men and all women is clearly untenable, a ‘Myth of Mars and Venus’ as Deborah Cameron (2007) puts it, two articles in a British weekend newspaper reminded me that question of inequality between women and men continues to resurface in various guises.

The Daily Mail quoted Dr Catherine Hakim, running a short piece headed ‘Feminist myths “are making equality laws unfair to men”’. Quite rightly, Hakim’s work has drawn attention to intra-category variation: that ‘women’ are not all the same, and certainly not all women who choose to work are the same: ‘The most misleading feminist myth is that women are united in their goals and priorities’. The Mail article concludes by summarising her latest findings that ‘while women could choose between work and family, men had fewer choices’. Representing this apparente difference in this way is not the whole story though. Wider range of choice doesn’t necessarily equate to better or more equal choices, nor does it interrogate the reasons for or consequences of work-life choices for groups of women and mean. ‘Feminist myths’ are presented as the problem – not the real life inequalities experienced by real people in real contexts. Is recognising this the same as getting my nail file out as Gerald Warner puts it?

Flick on a few pages in the Daily Mail and the outcome of the American election features in several articles. Michelle Obama is not without mention. Never mind the momentous implications of Barack Obama’s success, the British press is all too ready to focus its critique on Michelle Obama’s wardrobe. I’m not going to repeat the exact quotations here (in my opinion, they are irritating banal). Nonetheless, perhaps this persistent and stereotypical representation of a newsworthy female figure reminds us why questions about ‘myths of difference’ continue to evoke interest.

Encouraging Student-Centred Interaction Online

2008-10-21T10:22:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to announce that the School of English at Birmingham City University will be hosting an English Subject Centre workshop in January 2009: Encouraging Student-Centred Interaction Online. The day will showcase some up-to-the-minute examples of good practice in the use of wikis, blogs and social networking spaces; brainstorm some solutions to barriers that sometimes occur when using new technologies in teaching; have a hands on session where you can get bespoke advice on creating wikis and blogs and have a closing plenary. Whether you are completely new to using e-learning and want to get ahead in the field, or a pioneer who wants to share good practice, we'd love to see you at this event. Please see the link on the English Subject Centre pages and book online!

Facebook as social glue - and how to avoid getting unstuck

2008-10-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

Using Facebook to support student induction is without doubt a hot topic at present. Here's a report by Physorg.com on Facebook as 'social glue'. Much of what they say echoes what I found in the evaluation our Freshers' Facebook group, and in the responses to questionnaires I have been sending out in relation to my study of language use and self representation in Facebook. The most frequently named benefit to the Fresher's group was being able to make new friends easily, so that as one student put it, they 'felt better about the impending course'.

Of course, proving a causal link between improving the stickiness of your social glue and the rather more sticky issues of progression and retention is less than easy to sustain. A preliminary report on BCU's Facebook trial for the BA (hons) Visual Communication and BA (Hons) Media and Communication found that positive anecdotal feedback couldn't be causally linked to overall retention statistics at the end of the year. The report written by my colleague Andy Saxon provided a very useful list of tips if you do want to set up a group, which I reiterate here:

Provide each potential student with the web address for the group in a carefully worded letter
Link to the Facebook group from the departmental website, posters around the department on open days and so on.
Don't have your Facebook group as part of 'network'
Ensure that the Facebook group leader is familiar with FB and its culture.
Make sure your videos are fairly short and that pictures are low resolution.

A snapshot of the UK academic bloggers?

2008-10-10T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Times Higher has just published a short piece profiling the development of bloggers in the HE sector. It makes for interesting reading, not just because my blog gets a mention in it, but because it highlights many of the benefits and pitfalls that lie ahead for an academic who blogs. For me, it is the possibility to connect with people who I might never meet face to face, and to get feedback from them that is by far the most useful advantage of blogging. The suggestions I've had about using wikis and facebook, and the leads for further reading in my research have been great.

So while I might feel that my time is constantly being taken up with the day to day business of being a course director, teaching and trying to get papers written, I'll be keeping my blog going, so please leave me comments as they do help shape my work.

Facebook Fresher's group: Success story

2008-09-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day of our induction week. I'm pretty happy with the way the whole week went: no small feat given that I only took over as Course Director for our BA programmes less than a month ago. One of the great things has definitely been the take up and use of the Facebook group for the Freshers. At the beginning of the week we had 62 students joined up, and at the last look, 84 students out of an intake of around 120. But the numbers aren't everything - it's how the students evaluated it.

It won't surprise you at all to know that they loved the fact they could make friends with their fellow students before they even got here. That made a huge difference on the first day when it was so much easier to strike up conversations. But they also really appreciated the fact that they could ask questions and get the clarification they needed before arriving. Some of this came from me, but some of it also came from the students too, especially our student mentors who played a brilliant part in offering advice and encouragement from a student perspective. And to my pleasant surprise, conversations about the books they are going to be studying already started happening too.

The strength of using Facebook is that many of the students are already using it. I wasn't asking them to take on yet another new form information, but tapping into a forum they are already familiar with. And, as a social networking site, that is what it is best at: encouraging friendships and connections that build the social cohesion so important for good progression and retention. There are things that I don't like, like the inability to upload documents into groups. But we will definitely keep the group going (at the students' request) so they can in touch with each other, and probably as a tool for student representation too.

Multimodality and Pride and Prejudice

2008-09-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

This week I have been preparing my talk for an OCR event in London later this month: Modes in Motion. I'm talking about multimodality and how this could be integrated in the new English Literature and Language A-level. It's been good motivation to get cracking with the introduction to the edited collection on Narrative and Multimodality that will be coming out with Routledge. And it has also given me a good excuse to watch TV, films and surf the net looking for anime and manga. You would not believe the number of times Pride and Prejudice has been adapted! I've settled on a giving a sample analysis comparing Darcy snubbing Elizabeth and Darcy snubbing Maya (Bride and Prejudice). I was hoping to get some whizzy technical stuff in there, as I can't help feeling a bit conventional just doing a novel / film adaptation pairing. Hopefully it will turn out ok though. It's been fun making the transcription at least!

Facebook and students - who should speak?

2008-08-27T04:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back from my summer holidays now, and getting ready for the start of the new year. It's great to see that the Facebook group for the new Freshers joining the School of English is going well. I'm waiting to see if we can get it up to 50 members by the start of induction - it's nearly there!

The group seems to be doing it's job - the new students are writing away on the wall introducing themselves and asking questions. So if you're joining us and you haven't signed up for it yet - please do! From my point of view, I think the group is doing what I wanted it to. I am increasingly convinced that Facebook in academic contexts really is for the students to use as a 'hang out' social space, not really as a forum for academic discussion. Of course, that doesn't mean that students can't talk about their studies (it is (nearly) always great when they do) - it's just that the kinds of discussions I think should be generated by them and based on what they find important. I see my role as a 'gatekeeper', watching out for inappropriate content and so on, hopefully seeding the conversation from time to time with questions. But if you are a student reading this, what do you think? Would you want your lecturers talking to you on Facebook? And if you do - what would you want to be talking about?

I'm going to keep using Facebook for sure though - certainly as a way of keeping in touch with my personal tutees. And we'll have to evaluate what the freshers thought of the group when they get to induction!

Facebook group for English Freshers

2008-07-08T03:54:00.001-07:00

If you're joining the School of English at Birmingham City University next September, please join the Facebook Fresher's group we've set up for you! We hope that this will be a great resource for you to meet up online before we get to meet you in person in September.

I'm keeping a tally to see how fast we can get this group to grow, so the clock has started...

White Punks on Dope

2008-07-03T05:19:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to our MA English Literary Studies student, David Ewer! Dave created a multi-media piece in preparation for his creative writing dissertation. The piece is called White Punks on Dope, and I won't spoil the story by telling it my words here, but let you view it for yourself on You Tube..

Dave's work was showcased at our recent and very successful National Academy of Writing event, along with work from the NAW students. Following on from this, he has now been appointed to teach on the Universitas 21 Summer School, where he will be teaching students how to make digital movies. I wish him every success!

JISC report on student expectations of ICT

2008-06-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

The recent report 'Great Expectations of ICT' published by JISC makes for interesting reading. Of particular note were the comments about social networking sites. Apparently 73% of first year students in UK HEIs use social networking sites, but 'struggle to see how it could be used in learning'. What they do use it for, is talking about their coursework, their classes, their tutors - it seems to operate as a kind of socially oriented support, not a content driven support.

In the school of English at Birmingham City University, we are thinking of using Facebook to support student induction. My experience of using the wiki as part of a workshop at the Narrative & Multimodality symposium showed that one of the key benefits of the 'biography' page was priming the level of discussion through improved social cohesion. Given that so many of our freshers will already be using Facebook, how great would it be that they could meet each other online before coming to the campus in September.

Review of Inanimate Alice

2008-06-17T10:16:00.001-07:00

My review of Inanimate Alice is now available at the latest issue of CIAC. Enjoy!

The Apprentice and gendered discourse

2008-06-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, my poor blog has been languishing without update for just too long. Lots of projects on the go but time has equally been on the go, going, gone without me getting back here. But I stopped long enough to watch the final of the UK series of the Apprentice this week, if for no other reason than I had so many students write papers on gendered discourse styles in this programme for my language and gender module!

I couldn't help but notice that in the final scenes where Sir Alan was choosing between the last two finalists some stereotypical gender differences came into play. It seemed ironic to me that Claire, whose talent surely lay in her ability to articulate concepts and sell them to an audience, to me, blew it when it came to the final question 'Why should I give the job to you?'. Her answer 'because I really want it, and I want it more than Lee' was so personalised, emotively charged and - dare I say it - even chaotic? In contrast, Lee's answer was measured, and not focused on what he wanted but on the four areas in which he had demonstrated success - an answer in which he didn't focus on the fact that he wanted the job (although he clearly did). Was this a case of feminine emotion and excess finally losing the game? And when asked why she was not defending herself, Claire simply replied that she was 'not interrupting' - a flaw she had previously been chastised for. Whether or not it had anything to do with the decision that Sir Alan finally reached, it seemed a bit of a case where the woman was damned if she spoke (emotional excess) and damned if she didn't (she wasn't fighting her corner).

Texas trip

2008-05-09T05:15:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from visiting Austin, Texas to attend the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature - now known as the International Society for the Study of Narrative. We'll see if the name change effects the constitution of the conference, which this year was seriously American dominated and literature centred. My panel on narratives in new media showcased some of the work that will be in the upcoming collection I'm co-editing with Bronwen Thomas, due out with UNP next year.

For me, highlights of the conference were papers by Lisa Zunshine, Peter Rabinowitz, Jan Alber and Frederick Aldama. I felt strangely disconnected from a lot of the other material - perhaps because I've not been working on 'literary narratives' so much lately. But still I came away having spent time with some great academics - not least Brian Richardson, Amy Elias, Brian McHale, Alan Palmer, Jarmila Mildorf and of course my co-panelists (if you're reading this and don't find your name here, please don't take it personally - I'm just running out of space!). Special thanks go to Alan for organising the social scene so wonderfully. If you're on Facebook, you can check out the photos.

Inanimate Alice - game and narrative

2008-04-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

One of my (more enjoyable) tasks this week has been to write the draft of a review of Inanimate Alice for the Magazine du CIAC. Here's a brief excerpt of my thoughts so far on the relationship between game and narrative in Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's text:

...Inanimate Alice’s multiplicity extends beyond its use of semiotic resources, also exploiting the creative synergies between narratives in new media and computer gaming. Ludology-narratology debates are well-rehearsed and it is not my intention to reiterate them here. Instead, Inanimate Alice blends together concepts from both genres. Clearly, the text itself is primarily a digital fiction, and the actual games are embedded in each episode. However, as the narrative unfolds, the points of difference between games and storytelling become less clear. Both the narrative episodes and the games have similar underlying quest-like structures, with puzzles to be completed in order to reach closure. Narrative and gaming segments are interdependent insofar as both must be negotiated successfully in order to progress through the text (the games cannot be played without reading the story and the narrative cannot proceed unless the games are won).

Thematically, narrative and game are intertwined for the central character is also a game animator. Likewise, the audience are both readers (of narrative segments) and players (of the games). The figure Brad is both avatar and character. However, the audience’s interaction with the games and narrative is not identical. Avatars can be manipulated (for example, Brad’s icon can be slid across the screen to catch the falling Russian dolls) whereas although the reader experiences Alice’s focalized perspective, they cannot change the actions that Alice takes. Alongside this, there are subtle differences in the navigation of narrative and game segments. The reader is explicitly told how to move from one narrative segment to the next on the opening screen of the text. In contrast, there is no instruction on how the games are to be played. Instead the viewer has to work out for the rules for interacting with each game by hovering, clicking and dragging the cursor variously, nor do these rules transfer from one game to another or into the narrative segments. Perhaps familiarity with gaming literacy is assumed to be greater than that of digital fiction. Or perhaps the puzzle of how to interact with the game is part of the game, and assumed to be too frustrating for successful narrative processing. Either way, the progressive complexity of the gaming interaction in future Alice episodes will no doubt be fruitful grounds for further hybrid cross-overs between story and game in online texts.

For the full review, we'll have to wait for editorial approval. But if you've thoughts or comments about Inanimate Alice, gaming and narrative, please do add them.

Stories of the Self

2008-04-10T04:51:00.000-07:00

Kate Hayles has published a new book - Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. The book is being supported by web resources, including some essays. Mine is Stories of the Self on and off the Screen. Enjoy!

Dilemmas

2008-04-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm pondering on the next project that I'm hoping to work on. I feel it's time for me to get immersed in a larger scale project (which will hopefully turn into a book or something similar), but given the way my research leave has worked out (hurrah I am so glad that the research leave is happening), I'm only going to have 13 weeks to accomplish that, or at least get it underway. Not that I'm complaining.

So my options are:
Do I go down the narrative/health/new media route, and expand the work I've done on cancer blogs to look at other kinds of illnesses in the online and offline world?
Do I pursue a linguistically oriented study of online interactions (for example a study of communities of practice in Facebook, differentiated according to sociolinguistic variables?)
Do I try and blend the literary and linguistic background I have with new media studies?
Where does my interest in 'gender' fit with this?

The literary/linguistic blend is what I really wanted to do, focusing on how online interaction varies in web 2.0 and similar phenomenon, and how this results (or not) in new narratives genres, even tests what we understand 'narrative' to be at all. This would range from 'writerly' interaction on wiki novels through to the more conversational interchanges on blogs. But I'm worried that ultimately this will end up too inconsistent and methodologically variable to reach the audiences I want it to, or at least wouldn't be plausible for a funding bid, or end up as monograph.

Still mulling.

Project Narrative Blog

2008-04-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Project Narrative team over at OSU have just launched a blog. I am all in favour of this, as I'm sure it will help open out their work to others of us here in the blogosphere. I wonder which literary narratology folks will dip their toes in the water?

Cancer blogs: Gender and Narrative revisited

2008-03-28T06:04:00.000-07:00

This morning I have finally finished the draft of a second essay looking at gender and story genre in the sample of cancer blogs I've been analysing for what is now the last year. I have to confess that I'm still not satisified with the paper itself (which was commissioned for a special issue of Genre, edited by Will Slocombe), but as my husband muttered last night, I probably wouldn't be satisfied even if I worked on it for another month. So it's time to send it in, and I have.

In this second piece, I've been trying to problematise the question of gender difference in online communication, largely because of questions that have been raised in the various presentations I've given about this work in the last few months. These relate to critiques of essentialism and debates about whether I can say anything about gender at all, given the lack of guaranteed authenticity in online representation. As I've been reading Cameron and Kulick's (2003) Language and Sexuality, and returning again to Butler's work on drag performativity, both in preparation for an upcoming class for my Language and Gender module. Drawing on their ideas, I've been reframing my linguistic analysis of the blogs using ideas of indexing gender as a means of performing identities, and drawing attention to the multilayered strands of gendered identity itself.

In short summary, in my analysis of gender and genre in the cancer blog samples, I found that in terms of content, the speakers alluded to gendered subjectivity being fragmented under the embodied disruption brought about by critical illness and its side effects. In this sense, their writing represented anatomical performances of gender as unstable, leading them to question what it meant to 'be a woman' or 'be a man' when gendered markers were removed (e.g. hair, breasts, nails). Might we expect some kind of disruption of gendered styles of writing to follow this content? The answer is: I didn't find any. A corpus based analysis (frequency of word types) found no difference, an extensive analysis of transitivity choices found very little. And, when looking at macro-level patterning, the asymmetrical appearance of Reflective Anecdotes (a hyper-evaluated, emotively centred story genre) in just the writing done by the women seemed to index stereotypical gender identities (i.e. affectively oriented femininity v. tough, silent masculinity).

Why should this be? Well, I guess it depends in part on what linguistic evidence you look at. Herring and Paolillo point out that gender differences in CMC tend to show up in socio-pragmatic features, not lexical choice. So it's no suprise that I didn't find any in the corpus searches, but did find it in the use of evaluation devices. Another explanation is that these blog writers were counterbalancing their sense of non-normative gender identity with story styles that evoked highly stereotypical gendered behaviour. Either way, hopefully this discussion will not come over as an essentialist ' women bloggers talk emotively about illness and men don't'.

GURT '08

2008-03-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

I'm just home from GURT '08, which was an action-packed, intellectually rich conference. As someone who likes to work in both literary and lingusitic paradigms, I found myself feeling very much at home there. Pretty much everything I attended on the programme was excellent, and I've come away with lots to think about, some of which will come out in various posts here. And of course, I got to meet lots of really interesting, friendly people. So if I met you there, and you are checking this blog post out - a special 'hi - how are you?'.

Well-known, even infamous(?) Debbie Tannen was talking about her latest project examining stories sisters tell about each other. She made the distinction between 'Narrative' and 'narrative', parallelling the distinction between 'Discourse' (critical/cultural positioning) and 'discourse' (actual language use). An interesting thought, given the dispersal and dilution of the term 'narrative' in popular use, to mean anything from 'background information' (e.g. so what's the narrative on that?) to sequence of information (e.g. the RA5 Narrative). I can see what she was getting at, and I found myself reflecting on how the 'narratives' in the blog posts I've been looking at index the 'Narrative' of gender identity when it comes under threat from critical illness.

As for my own presentation (on the cancer blogs project) - well - strangely enough it was one of the toughest papers I've ever had to give. Not because of anything I was saying, but because the presenter before me was showing a digital narrative about the death of her father through cancer. How anyone could sit through that and fail to be moved, I don't know! But standing up to speak when you feel choked - I have never so not wanted to give a paper before! But I did, and it went fine, and there was good discussion afterwards. But more on that later.

Text-based wikis and deep learning

2008-02-28T07:36:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am finding myself needing to excuse the long gap between this blog post and the last. Truth is that I have been tied up with a couple of projects that I didn't feel like a could blog about at the time (a job search I was selected as finalist of which ultimately didn't work out but took over my life for a couple of months) and then examining a PhD (which was an absolute pleasure and successful for the candidate - well done Jess). And since then, well, I've been trying and failing to catch up with myself whilst writing an application for a National Teaching Fellowship, revising a paper for a journal, talking at a conference at UCC in Ireland and doing all the 'usual stuff of life' - teaching, administration, trying to stay on the right side of sane.

But in amongst all of this, an email from a friend of mine (Stephen Harlow) has been languishing in my in box. And today I finally got time to open the link to find a very interesting article (Student Engagement in Distance Learning Environments) in First Monday on the use of wikis as means of promoting collaborative discussion of texts (rather than using discussion threads). It seems like a useful idea, and one that I'll be looking to use as I continue to explore the different ways web 2.0 can enhance our learning experiences.

Protagonize

2008-01-11T03:20:00.000-08:00

Another example of collaborative interactive fiction: Protagonize, passed on to me by my friend and colleague Matt Machell. Protagonize describes itself as an example of the addventure, a collaborative narrative hybrid of choose your own adventure and round robin stories. Google 'addventure' and a whole host of them appear!

Facebook diaries

2008-01-10T03:53:00.000-08:00

And, thanks to Jill Walker's blog (again), another instance of facebook, blogging and storytelling, this time a tale of love, revenge and the online world. Check the Facebook Diaries out and see what you think for yourself.

Collaboration, interaction and narrative - thoughts on a new project

2008-01-10T03:41:00.000-08:00

My research so far has suggested to me that the collaborative potential of web 2.0 may have far reaching implications for generating new story forms. What is needed is a much more detailed, empirical and text-based analysis that complements the theoretical study of interaction and digital affordances. My work on cancer blogs suggests that the capacity to interact with an online audience has a pragmatic impact on the development of narrative structure, leading to what I have described as a ‘Reflective Anecdote’. But other types of interaction are possible, such as a more writerly interaction that you’d find on a wiki-novel, or a spatial and culturally oriented sense of collaboration made possible through GPS mapping. This morning I read through the draft of a chapter written for the new collection (New Narratives: Theory and Practice) that I’m co-editing with Bronwen Thomas. In this chapter, Brian Greenspan describes fascinating work which brings together aboriginal storylines and a live hypertextual experience in geophysical space of an Australian city. It reminded me that if I’m going to theorise collaboration and interaction (buzzwords of the web 2.0) then there are many facets to this, cultural, political and gendered that exist in many media in the offline world as well as online.

Collaborative storytelling - Twitter

2007-12-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

The Darkness Inside is a twittory - a collaborative narrative told in twitter. Angela Thomas's blog is (as always) an interesting read, and her post about this text is a good place to start.

Storytelling in Facebook - Why Some Dolls are Bad

2007-12-26T16:36:00.000-08:00

A while back I spotted an interesting looking lead on Jill Walker's blog, about a graphic narrative in Facebook: Why Some Dolls are Bad. So I've finally got around to signing up for the application. I need some more time to play around with how the narrative works - but it makes for an interesting comparison for the new forms of collaborative storytelling that are emerging. Apparently someone is even trying to write a story using del.icio.us. I'm just guessing, but I reckon that's going to stretch even the broadest definition of what makes a story!

Genre stretching (II) - Pantomime

2007-12-21T00:10:00.000-08:00

Last night we went for our annual pantomime trip to see Aladdin at Birmingham Hippodrome. It was absolutely excellent - I highly recommend it as a high quality pantomime show. I really liked the ways that the director, Paul Elliott had really stretched the pantomime genre. The drag element was carried off in conventional fashion by Don Maclean as Widow Twankey, but the role of Aladdin was not a woman but the dashing (and slightly full of himself) John Barrowman. A funny twist was the inclusion of a scene where one of The Grumbleweeds appeared as Cher - drag performativity but not so radical that audiences would struggle with it (judging by the roars of laughter). Certainly a case of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque allowing space for touches of subversion contained in humour!

What I liked more than anything else, was the 3D Genie, provided by Bogglevision, which, my programme tells me 'is all about creating theatre sets that come to life during the show'. It was an amazing experience which crossed theatre, cinema, adventure rides and computer games. Audience interactivity was opened up to a whole range of possibilities and illusions. It really was imaginative, innovative, genre-stretching and thoroughly well done. The show runs until 27 January, so my advice is to get along and see it if you can!

Genre stretching - post (I) - Enchanted

2007-12-20T23:11:00.000-08:00

Last weekend we took our kids to see Enchanted, the latest Disney film, which claims to take Disney films to a whole new level with the ending that it creates. For those of you who don't know, the story of Enchanted follows a cartoon Disney princess (Giselle) who is transported into present-day New York, courtesy of the wicked stepmother, and the adventures she undertakes whilst attempting to get back to 'Disney cartoonland Andulasia'. Of course, there is nothing really new about mixing cartoon style disney with more conventional film presentation (remember Pete and the Dragon? And later on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). But Enchanted tranforms the cartoon figures into human actresses (and vice versa at the end), and (spoiler ahead) switches the 'human' and 'disney' characters in the end. But I have to confess that the feminist in me was somewhat disappointed in all of this. Probably for the same reason that I was never that into my daughter playing with Barbie dolls. There is some attempt to break with genre and have the disney princess take on the evil stepmother, saving her NY hero so that he fell into her arms in the climactic rescue scene. But there was a whole lot more that endorsed disney stereotypes in idealised, and (from my perspective) in sadly non-ironic terms. Was this film transliterate in its genre mixing? Well, maybe a little. But it definitely made me think that novelty soon disappears when we move across modes of representation. Was that genre mixing creative? Well, maybe in some ways, but also firmly supportive of the existing conventions of representing femininity.

DMU slides on Transliterate Discussions

2007-12-20T23:06:00.000-08:00

Following up on my presentation at DMU, Heather Conby wrote a blog post about it, and very kindly uploaded the PPT into slideshare.

Wiki project phase one completed

2007-12-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

We have finally reached the end of the teaching sessions for our first semester, and I have been evaluating the success of using wikis in my narrative analysis class. Am I glad I tried this? Yes, definitely. Are the students glad we used it? Yes, definitely. Of course, the evaluation is a little more fine-grained than that. I presented a summary when I talked at De Montfort in the humanities faculty earlier this week. When I work out how to put the PPT slides up here, I'll do it (yes, still learning techie-stuff all the time). I'm also presenting a report on the project at my own faculty learning conference next Friday. The poster presentation that will be part of the lunch time displays is at the top of this post. I'm really grateful to the LHDS faculty at BCU which funded the curriculum innovation bursary that made purchasing the laptops possible. But I'm even more grateful to the students who put so much of their work on the wiki and got so much out of it.

Speaker's Corner

2007-12-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to the newly refurbished Town Hall in Birmingham City Centre with some of our MA English Literary Studies students. We went to an event called Speaker's Corner which was really great - very powerful, funny, painful, engaging. A mixture of music, poetry, story set against an urban backdrop, which in the town hall was juxtaposed with the pipes of the organ and classical architecture, the collision of styles was eclectic and though provoking. I found myself thinking, 'Is this transliterate'? Or is it better described as montage? Bricolage? At any rate, the movement between and across styles and mode (music, image, rap, reggae) was creative and packed a punch being mono-literate would not have achieved.

UKOLN - update and summary

2007-11-28T06:16:00.001-08:00

Brian Kelly has written a report which usefully summarises the key points of the UKOLN workshop I attended on Monday. The report is full of useful links to the main talks from the event, for those who weren't able to be there in person.

UKOLN - Potential of Blogs and Social Networking

2007-11-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

I've been attending the UKOLN workshop on Exploring the Potential of Blogging and Social Networking. Most of the PPTs from the talks, along with summaries of the discussion panels from the afternoon are available from the workshop wiki, so rather than try and summarise them all here, I'll just pick out some of the main concerns that emerged. These include:

Various tensions between HE's attempts to impose control and standardisation on blogging software and the servers on which blogs are held (so as to provide security, archiving, standardisation) and the recognition that external blogging tools (and wikis for that matter) are often more flexible than those enabled within managed environments (like Moodle, WebCT for example)
The need to educate users (be they staff or students) about how to maintain an online identity safely and appropriately.
The large variation between what is referred to as 'digital literacy' pointing to 'blind spots' in students' skills (i.e. knowing how to use facebook, youtube, secondlife) doesn't mean that this can be transferred into teaching and learning uses of electronic forms of communication.
Debates about privacy, and the implications of blurring the boundaries between professional and personal domains (whether this is unavoidable, preferable, dangerous).

I haven't come away feeling that my world view of technology has been changed, but it was great to meet some interesting people and look at web 2.0 from an alternative point of view.

Only the most tenuous of links...

2007-11-25T10:38:00.001-08:00

I generally work on the principle that I only blog about work things and not about anything that happens outside of work. Well, I guess this is the exception to the rule. Thursday evening, Gavin and I went to the German market in Birmingham city centre. It was really pretty and very atmospheric, just the thing to distract me from a horrendously busy week at work. After wandering around for a while, we browsed a jewellery stand up near centenary square. I finally decided that, yes, I was going to buy a rather lovely green bracelet and went to pay. The vendor so reminded me of one of my former students, so in my usual fashion, I said 'you so remind me of someone I used to teach' and it turned out that it was in fact someone I had taught about six years ago at BCU. She was very happy to see me and we had a happy five minutes catching up, made all the more happy by the discount she then gave me on the jewellery! So here is my support in return - if you want to pick up some lovely jewellery before Christmas, then go and visit Michelle's jewellery stand in the German Market, or visit one of the associated stores, 'The Jewellery Stop' in Kings Heath, Bath or Leamington Spa.

Using electronic literature in the classroom

2007-11-16T06:41:00.000-08:00

At last I've finally finished a draft of my essay about using electronic literature in the classroom. Subject to editorial review, the essay will appear as part of a project undertaken by Kate Hayles. In the essay I argue for the inclusion of electronic literature alongside offline story forms in the teaching of narrative theory. I've experimented with this in the past semester, perhaps not as extensively as I would have liked, but still it has been a start.

Using a wiki and having the laptops in the classroom has been crucial to this process from a pragmatic perspective. It's enabled me to embed a range of digital texts in the curriculum so that students can see them on the screen alongside their printed handouts. The texts I've used have been Minerva's blog: A Woman of Many Parts, In Search of Oldton, by Tim Wright, and Shelley Jackson's My Body. The texts have been analysed using many different frameworks, exploring narratives of personal experience (Labov), plot structure (Hoey) temporal sequencing (Genette), characterisation and narratorial reliability. In summary, I'd argue that using electronic literature has been useful for the following reasons:

It draws attention to the influence of medium, and facilitates transmedial comparison
The increased sensitivity to multimodality challenges the verbal hegemony of much narrative theorizing
The unfamiliar conventions of the hypertextual / blogging format enable students to question what 'narrative' entails, and to reflect on the assumptions of print culture that become so taken for granted as to be rendered invisible.

There's much more that I'd like to do with these kinds of texts, and I plan to integrate other examples in my language and gender module next semester. In the meantime, it has been great to see how students have embraced these new story forms and at least some will include them in their end of term assignments. I'll let you know how it goes.

Using the internet in scholarship

2007-11-09T06:11:00.000-08:00

I've just been reading Jill Walker's recent post about encouraging 10/11 year olds to evaluate the resources they find on the internet. It resonated with several issues that have come up for me this week. First, my daughter has come home from school with a CD ROM which will apparently equip me to know how to help her use the internet safely. Shame my laptop doesn't have a CD drive. Will have to take that one to work to read in my lunch break (did I just say lunch break? Since when did I ever take one of those??). My daughter uses google quite happily because she likes making PPT presentations just for fun, and uses google to find pictures to illustrate her creations. She's 8 years old, by the way. I must admit I've just been a bit naive about letting her get on with it, but I guess that time has passed and some need for evaluation (all kinds) is here already. Second, I've just finished grading my new first years' first assignments. Well, they did ok, but it was so marked that 95% of them were supplementing the course text book only with online documents they had found. And while these sources were reputable enough (no wikipedia), I found myself vaguely irritated by this. Don't my students read research published in books anymore? Or is it just too time consuming to go to the library and find printed studies, when we've linked all sorts of interesting sites into our VLE? Oh, I am sounding more than a bit jaundiced. Maybe this is as revealing of my own prejudice as anything else. On the other hand, the wiki project is still going well, and students are annotating their work with interesting online material week by week. And that doesn't irritate me at all - quite the opposite!

Transliteracy, wikis and essay writing

2007-11-02T05:33:00.001-07:00

This week I tried a new venture with the wiki I am using to support student's work on my Narrative Analysis module. The students are starting to prepare for their main assignment now, and I wanted to be able to help them use various strategies in planning their project. One issue I have encountered in the past is that mind maps are often confused with essay plans. To help students make the transition between a visual image which emphasises spatial connection and a verbal structure which depends on linear argumentation, I set them the following exercise.

1. In groups of 4-5, they had to develop a diagram or mind map to summarise the topics we had covered in class (different frameworks for categorising narrators), showing how this connected with any other narrative theory we had discussed on the module, and giving examples from the (mostly literary) extracts they had in their handouts.

You can see a sample mindmap at the top of this entry. Once they had completed the map, I muddled the groups so that the students reviewed each other's work, face-to-face. This is usually where I would stop in my pre-wiki days, feeling pretty pleased that students had done some good work and had some interesting discussion with each other. The problem is, that in the offline world, those mindmaps are usually disregarded and we don't help students transfer those connections into other mediums of forms of literacy.

My response has been to take photos of each of the maps, post them on the wiki pages (with the help of our fab web designer Matt who resized them for me - Thank you!), and ask the students to use the map as the basis for either a paragraph-length summary of their conclusions or a structured list of points for how they would develop the discussion further. Fingers crossed they will do it. Fingers crossed again it will help them prepare their assignments. For me, it's an exciting step in using web 2.0 technology to support student learning and showing how transliteracy can be put to work in the humanities seminar room.

Storytelling in Facebook

2007-10-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

I've just come across this interesting survey from Writer Response Theory of collaborative writing options that are possible within Facebook. Angela Thomas has blogged about this too. It sounds like something I want to look into. I'm convinced from my work on the cancer blogs that patterns of online interaction are actually creating new hybrids of story genres, rather than just changing the ways that narrators, audience and texts relate. I have a germ of an idea for a new study I want to develop from this, taking a snapshot of the interactive possibilities that are now available and looking at the linguistic and narratological developments that emerge. But I need to finish writing the essays I am commissioned for before then!

Using wikis in the classroom - a brief update

2007-10-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

My project using wikis in the classroom with my students seems to have taken off particularly well with my undergraduates. My aim was to use a wiki in class time, so that students could record summaries of their group work at the point of discussion. The idea behind this was that we could then project each of the pages up on to the screen so that the classroom discussion was permanently recorded and could be viewed by all students. To my amazement, the undergraduates have really taken to this to a much greater extent than I ever had hoped. We use the laptops every week, with one laptop per small group (up to five students).

After class, students have gone away and edited their work, adding URLs, images, rewriting their analysis which is creating an extensive portfolio of their learning. I am blown away, truth be told. I didn't really think it would work. It is so useful for me, because I can see how much they understand and support them with their writing skills to a much greater extent than I ever have been before. It seems to make them more focused in their discussions, and they are so motivated that they meet up in their small groups during the week to work on the wiki too. They tell me they really find it helpful to record their work like this, as otherwise half the lesson gets taken up with each group reporting back.

Not to say that all of this is glitch free. The first week I tried to use this with the MA students, pbwiki was full of bugs (which they fixed right away) but it made the lesson a nightmare. And I have a black hole in one area of the teaching room where the wifi cuts out, so if the students move the laptop across the table they lose the internet connection. But it is totally worth it for what I and the students are gaining from it.

Facebook, Media, Mode

2007-10-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

In Jess's response to my last post, she alluded to the question of whether transliteracy involved crossing media. I confess that I have not always been very clear about distinguishing between media and mode - the two concepts have areas of overlap, for sure. However slippery they are, though, these terms do have different meanings which are separable and have varying implications for exploring transliteracy in relation to something like Facebook. Ryan (2004) and (2006) presents an excellent discussion of what the term 'media' might involve, highlighting the difficulties of interdisciplinary interpretation and debates as to whether media are platforms, conduits, or raw materials of some kind. In contrast, 'mode' has distinct meanings, especially within literature on multimodality (aka Kress & van Leeuwen), and refers to the semiotic resources used in communication (visual, aural, oral, haptic and so on). So facebook might be a transliterate means of doing friendship because it is employing digital media as a platform for social networking, and that media contrast invokes different modalities. Although it includes image, the communication is still primarily verbal (I think). In contrast, maintaining friendship offline can involve other modalities, including aural/oral, gesture, touch/physical presence as cues for how to manage / read that relationship. Maybe transliterate social networks is the capacity to respond appropriately to the multimodal demands of each media that is used in the process of social relationship, and being aware of the affordances and limitations of each.

On Facebook

2007-10-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

Ah my poor blog, languishing neglected out there in the ether. Finally, as you can tell, here are some of the recent things I've been thinking about. One of these is the fast growing phenomenon of Facebook. Now, I have to confess that I approached Facebook with a degree of sceptism, but have found myself increasingly seduced by its lure (although I am only 14% addicted according to its statistics, unlike my better half who is 29% addicted). So why do I like facebook and what kinds of questions does it make me ask?

Well, I like facebook because I am, essentially, quite a friendly / nosey person, and I like seeing what is going on with friends (be they close or not so close) but don't have time to keep up with them all face-to-face. So I really enjoy the fact that I can flick on and see snippets of what is happening with my friends as far flung as oz, across the UK, the US. Nothing beats the face-to-face, of course. Facebook will never replace actually hanging out with these guys, but when they are far, far away (to quote Shrek) that is not likely to happen, and this is a convenient, asynchronous substitute. So, for me personally, facebook is a social thing.

What kinds of questions does it make me ask? Well, first of all, it makes me ask whether facebook is a transliterate way of doing relationships. If transliteracy involves moving across different platforms, invoking multimodality, being aware of context and so on, then is my online version of 'catching up' a form of transliteracy? And what does this do to how we manage relationships? One thing that facebook does is to bring all your friends together into your profile without subcategorising them into the real world communities into which they belong. And so what you disclose gets seen by them all, whether they are contacts through work, or family friends, or students (past and present). And that, for sure, is slightly wierd, at least when you start using facebook. The collapsing of distinct social networks means that I seem to work to the 'lowest common denominator'. That is, I try and disclose only that which I am prepared to let all of them see. For some people, that means they say and do nothing. I tend to be pretty open about my personal life (my Facebook profile says I have a ridiculously high degree of extraversion), so slightly more than nothing gets into my status updates. But I have got more bland and non-descript, conscious of who sees what.

I also wonder what kind of linguistic resource Facebook might be. Is it something we might use to trace how internet language is evolving within certain social networks. For the 30 million users of facebook (did I get that right?) Facebook categories them by age, gender and so on. So a sociolinguist or anthropologist might go and look at usage patterns, profile construction as a means of doing identity, the language that gets used on people's walls. I'm sure there is a PhD in there somewhere. I haven't figured out yet where or how Facebook archives the updates, or if they are publically accessible. But I wonder if this might build some kind of multifaceted narrative in itself, where the chronological updates are micro-entries in an ongoing life story. And would women and men write different kinds of updates? What kinds of things do they say?

Food for thought. But the offline mode of doing life with people is calling. Let's hope I make it back to the blog sooner than the last time!

Who comments on blogs about cancer?

2007-07-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

While writing up the first of my papers about gender and blogging, I realised that it was not enough simply to look at whether the blogs written by women or written by men gained the most comments. I needed to look at who was commenting on the blogs too. So I went back through all the entries of the 20 cancer blogs, and calculated whether women or men commented most (and had another category for commenters who did not disclose a gender specific identity).

The first thing I discovered was that my original statistics were wrong, because so many of the men's blogs were commented on by 'junk' mailers. Once I had cleaned up the data, a very different picture emerged. Instead of an equal picture where the men's blogs got as much comment as the women's, the women's blogs were attracting over five times the amount of comment than did the men's.

The second thing that became clear was that gender couldn't be used as a bottom line explanation for commenting interation. While women posted the most comments overall, men posted more comments on blogs written by men and women posted more comments on blogs written by women. My explanation for this pattern is that the comments on the cancer blogs are markers of shared experience, offering or seeking support and guidance. Because some of the types of cancer the blog authors experience are gender specific, this gives rise to a gendered pattern of interaction. So it's the shared experience (which is gender specific) not the gender of the writer in itself which generates the pattern. However, it is really obvious from the statistics that the women's blogs are much much more interactive than the mens', and that the offline storytelling which supposedly enables shared experience to support friendship between women seems to be carried over into the blogosphere too.

So, the point I'm at is to reinforce the importance of considering content and context in the analysis of gender and CMC. What I've found is markedly different from the observations of Melissa Gregg's paper 'Posting with Passion' that Jess pointed out to me the other day. Just as with offline interaction, there are some general differences that carry over across content and context, but genre and discourse style can complicate that in various ways.

Cancer Blogs and Travel Blogs

2007-06-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

I finished the statistical analysis of the sample of travel blogs I took as a point of comparison with the cancer blog project. The results are interesting:

In terms of post length:
For the cancer blogs, women wrote twice as much as men. For the travel blogs the men wrote a staggering four times as much as the women.

It seems that the topic influences the length of post, where men are more likely to write more about external events and women more likely to write more about experiences that impact them personally.

In terms of evaluative density:
This was the same for both the travel and cancer blogs: women wrote more evaluatively dense posts than the men (and the cancer blogs were slightly more dense in evaluation than the travel blogs, but the differences were tiny here). This suggests that it is the blog format, not the topic that influences the quantity of evaluation used.

In terms of evaluative profile:
This is where the biggest differences lay. Blogs about cancer were rich in the use of Labovian comparators (especially modals and negation). Blogs about travel were rich in Labovian intensifiers and statements of external evaluation 'It was the most amazing time of my life!'.

What do I make of this? Well, it seems that offline genres (like the narratives of illness described by Frank (1994) do influence their online offspring, which is what you might expect. My findings so far suggest that the relationship between blog genre and gender are complex and need to take account of subject matter as well as general blog categories.

Blogging and story genres - latest update

2007-06-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

In the weeks since my last post I have been busy pulling together some of the analysis on the cancer blogs project I've been working on for the last few months. Finally, some trends seem to be emerging, which I'll put in summary below.

Post length: The posts by the women bloggers are twice as long as those by the men bloggers.
Comments: The women and men seem to get about the same amount of comments
Links: The women put more links in their posts, and link more often to sites about information. They also have more links to personal blogs in their side bars
Evaluation density: The women use more evaluation devices (that is, features that make their posts more vivid or tellable, to use Labov's phrase) per hundred words than the men do.
Evaluation profile: Despite the difference in overall quantity, the profile of the evaluative subtypes was very similar indeed for the women and men's entries.

I was talking about this with one of my colleagues and he said, 'So tell me something I don't already know'. Hmmm. Well, here's my attempt at this:

While all of the above confirms much of the existing research (see for example, Nowson 2006 on gender and blog post length; Herring et al. 2006 on genre and gender), what has not yet been considered is how this relates to narrative theory, and, in particular to sociolinguistic findings about storytelling styles in offline environments. So far, I have come to the tentative conclusion that the analysis suggests that genre is more important in determining narrative style than gender, and that what I am looking at in these blogs is a particular subgenre. I'm calling this a 'hyper evaluated narrative' for now, and positioning this as a new category within Martin and Plum's (1997) categories of story genres.

The next stage is to test the relationship between story topic and use of evaluation. I suspect that the hyper-evaluated narratives are being constructed because the narrators are talking about narratives of illness (as in Frank's 1994 description of this 'orphan genre', which has now given birth to online offspring of various kinds). Will the same evaluation patterns occur in blogs about other topics? And will the same gendered pattern emerge? I'm testing this out in a comparable corpus of travel blogs.

In the meantime, I have reached the stage of writing the introductory section for the first of the papers that will come from this research. It's a chapter in a book I am co-edited with Bronwen Thomas, called New Narratives: Theory and Practice, under contract with UNP. Back to that, now.

Women Business and Blogging - Jory Des Jardins

2007-06-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

The third plenary at the WBBC conference was by founder of Blogher, Jory Des Jardins. Her talk was entitled: Tapping Into the Web's Power Influencers: Women.

The talk centred on the questions of why women are becoming influential as bloggers and how does blogging validate women's experiences online. She began with the story of how Blogher began, with Jory's observation that around half of the people online were women, but so few were participating in conferences about technology? Jory claims that this is a legacy effect, where the founders of the web as men were also linking to each other. However the founding of Blogher began to change all that, both as an event and as a business.

The main body of her talk followed the points below, which are mostly summarised from her PPT slides.

Media has been shifting so that...

Virtual reputation is everything: What happens when you google yourself? What do you find? Whether we know it or not, you have an online reputation which you need to maintain.

Dispersed media/dispersed control has resulted in multiple sources of expertise on the web, and the authors who are anyone and everyone, not just those who are socially sanctioned.

We now suffer from information saturation - where we now prioritise items we are 'invited' to read (wikis ,IM, Skype, RSS) We need things to come to us, rather than going out and looking for them.

Women will rule! Women recommend and promote usually and tend to interact more. Blogging is the 'perfect media' for women, and exploits their talents in communication.

Marketers will finally 'get it': Women are now spending more time on line than watching TV!

She next produced a summary of 'Women & their habits online':

Women outnumber men online , overall as well as among marrieds, among people with kids at home, in every age category but 65+

Women outspend men online and off, women who blog are 30% more likely than average female internet users to shop online and spend more when they buy.

Women outpace men online

women are equally as likely as men to 'read a blog' and 'create a blog'

Women write between 46-53% blogs

Women's use of words on a blog 'far exceeds that of men'

(Sources for this information include: Moms online Parenting with the web 2.0, emarketer June 2006,comscore, Pew Internet and American Life Project.)

Her next point debated why Social Media is Important Now, which really looked at the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0, where...

Web 1.0: would use marketing dollars to draw traffic, then drop them when the showed up, Emphasise page views / clickthroughs, but used web pages as conduits of information with no means for accountability or engagement. As she points out, looking for a post on a discussion boards doesn't work if you want to extract information via the web.

In comparison (and contrast), Web 2.0: Devotes resources to interaction: companies understand the importance, time and resources needed to interact effectively. She argued that companies need someone who not just writes but read blogs. You need to read and interact with other bloggers, not just sit writing one on their own.

In line with this, the nature of engagement has changed, raising questions of how you maintain the quality of blogs? Blogher's response ist to have an editorial standard for their blogging network. You don't want to comprise your message, but you need to have quality. New measures of interaction are comments, posts and links. These show the quality of the traffic given, not just the quantity of it.

She looked at the profile of women bloggers, according to recent Blogher Reader demographic survey results:

94% female, 87% US

64% between 28-40 years old

51% visit daily, 93% will return

94% with greater than high school education

70% married

58% have children at home

53% blog themselves

64% state an income greater than $50k

More significantly, Blogher has become a place of community and a place of interchange, not just a site of information. For companies who want to exploit this, women bloggers become an important marketting resource because bloggers pass the message on, they amplify the effect of anything they are talking about.

Small business use blogging because it gets them renown more quickly. Therefore it is important to engage with them efficiently. The two key measures are Engagement and Influence. How you measure these is debatable. It can be quantifiable (comments, traffic) and qualitative (post quality, respect) Even if someone blogs about your product there is no guarantee that someone will go and buy it. However, for many bloggers money is not the important thing, recognition and reputation is more significant.

She issued a list of tips for companies wanting to reach women:

1. Support bloggers and what interests them

2. Make your promotion blogworthy

3. Help women connect

4. Respect women's preferences

5. Understand how conversations work.

All of which is great advice. Jory's talk was engaging and showed the commercial potential of women and blogging.

Women Blogging and Business - Eileen Brown

2007-06-08T02:56:00.000-07:00

The next speaker at the WBB conference was Eileen Brown. Her plenary was entitled: Changing Customer Perception Through Blogging.

Eileen began by raising the gender politics of the technical world. She pointed out that there are only 3-5% women working in her sector of the world of technology. A gender pattern that was certainly reversed at this conference and was commented on by many of the participants.

The central theme of her talk was questioning why companies blog? How can blogging change the public perception of a company? From her experience at Microsoft, negative perception can carry through into custmoer (dis)satisfaction. The purpose of blogging in Eileen's job seemed to be a means of introducing a personal element, presenting the image the company employees were 'real people'.

How fantastic to work for a company that prizes innovation, that has a 'just do it' attitude!

Why does Eileen blog? She then talked about the work of Robert Scoble, and his influence in changing perceptions of Microsoft. Her central argument for using blogs are because it is an effective medium for getting information out to people who she would not normally come into contact with, or could touch herself. However, there is a risk in blogging, as the disturbing case of the threatening posts on Kathy Sierra's blog shows.

Technorati rankings are used as a tool for tracking perceptions of Microsoft. Bloggers have even changed how internal processes have been handled in their company. She then went on to consider what policies on blogging companies have. Microsoft's seems pretty apt to me: 'Blog smart'. In that environment, the blogging community is self policing about the nature of posts that are put forward. 'Blogging smart' is an empowering concept, rather than restricting.

She put out a list of her 'top 10 lessons' for blogging:
Blog frequently (a rhythm of blogging, not necessarily every day)
Answer every comment
Don't sell
Link. link. link
Traffic isn't the goal
Be authentic
Expect criticism - be humble
Don't blog when you're drunk / down / angrey
Blog Smart
Never delete a post

Great advice for those of us who are venturing into this arena.

I was particularly interested in the way that the blogging and its linked idea of storytelling personalises the corporate image. What is it about the narrative and the individual that does this?

And a closing note: great cartoons from gaping void.

Women Business and Blogging conference - Meg Pickard

2007-06-08T02:13:00.000-07:00

Meg Pickard kicked off the first session at the WBB conference this morning with a plenary entitled: Whose Web is it Anyway? The following a whistle stop summary of her excellent and inspiring talk.

Her main focus followed these questions:

How is content changing?
How is web publishing changing
How are communities changing?

She suggested that users can interact with content in different ways, based on a continuum of consumption, interaction, curation and creation, all of which have different degrees of intensity with different levels of ease and creativity. In detail of each of these is glossed as follows:

Consumption: here the creators here do all of the work, and readers do not control this, they 'simply' read this. But, what does content look like in the wild? If seen through RSS feeds without visiting the site, the reader moves further away from the source of the information. The reader does not necessarily see the changes to the full web page context.

Interaction changes, though, through commenting functions. However this is not always polite and can be 'rowdy'. This still remains on the creator's territory (they can switch comments on or off). Content interaction also changes where other bloggers can cite your text and even talk about you but on their sites. But this is out of the original source control - a second level of creation or intertextuality.

For me this raises the question of the public and private divide that all bloggers face.

Attention data is also significant, and influences content just by clicking on it. Consumption therefore influences the profile of content. But does it influence the content itself or just the process or profile of consumption? Surely this is to do with status rather than the text itself?

Content curation: a new way of thinking about people engaging in processes of collection (social bookmarking, folksonomy. This changes the notion of authority and widens the way that sources are brought together.

Content mash ups: Meg argued that this was being creative not with particular sources but with the concept of content altogether. She claimed that content is not just editorial tone but the editorial metadata that goes with it and how this can be used to create a more embodied, localised sense of the data.

Content creation: Meg set this against citizen journalism, defining content creation as vocal witnesses to experience. It is not chasing down leads, but rather individuals giving their own testimony. Altogether, these examples of 'microjournalism' can be collated together in a montage or mosaic. The underlying principle is democratic - we are all witnesses of our own experience.
'User generated content' (eg Youtube, Flickr, Blogger) where on independent sites people are creating content for themselves. But how do the users think about their content? Meg claimed that they think about it as acts of storytelling, told for their own audiences.

Meg then asked what makes a blog different from other net genres? Is it the formatting, design, technology, dating, archives, commenting facilities? Or is it the editorial tone and proposition? Is it technology or the conversational potential (interaction). What's the difference between a news article and a blog post? The first is authorative and answers questions, the second asks questions, string together ideas and concepts, are open-ended, non-definitive and provoke comment.

This returned to the question of subject matter. What are blogs about? Can you define a blog in terms of central theme or subject? And while a blog might not have central content, it does have a context, and that is the user themselves.

Meg then interrogated the notion that 'content is king' She proposed instead that Context is king. The context is the vital why that shapes the content itself. Examples to support her argument include Last.fm, myspace and facebook. The platform is enough and drives the way the site is used.

When the boundaries between users and creators of content change, what happens when things go wrong (grayblog). What happens to property rights? Who has the rights to use and take information without asking permission? 'If you don't want it to be used, why did you put it out there?' Does putting something online mean that you don't mind if it gets used? How on earth do you control all of that?

Meg proposed that the answer to this is the concept of creative commons.

She ended by talking about community. What does 'community' mean? Is this the same as commonality? Is a bus queue a community? The individuals don't relate to each other, but to the bus stop. How do you move from the metaphor of a '1+1' metaphor, but 1-2-1 interaction. Meg's central point is that interaction and relationships

Jake McKee's communityguy.com definition emphasises regular interaction around a shared context.

She posed the question, 'Why is community important?' answering it as follows:
Because they increase relevance

They increase emotional connection to the experience
The increase social connection to each other
(Blog commenters talk to each other, not about the subject)
They add depth.
The make experiences more relevant, human and personal
They importove the quality of content

But communities need nurturing and care...

How do we do this?
With human solutions (moderation, policy, consistency)
With technical solutions (flagging, cerating profiles, peer recommendation, ratings, feeds)
Editorial solutions (proposition, the framing of debate, tone of voice, reward, interaction) 'Prevention is better than cure'.
How do authors involve themselves in their communities?

She argued that the changes between content, context and communities must then change the way that people write.

She proposed a cycle of engagement (casual, connected, committed) which mapped on to her continuum of content engagement: consuming - interaction - curating - creating and then back to consumption again.

She closed by arguing that we are now moving from experiences 'on the web' but 'of the web'. I wonder if we can go further in teasing this out? And a nice touch, she closed Michael Wesch's 'The machine is us'.

Using wikis in teaching

2007-05-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

After creating the Narrative Workshop wiki, I am all set and ready to embed this in my own and other colleagues' teaching. Funding permitting, I am planning to purchase a suite of laptops so that my students can use the wiki as a means of capturing class room discussion, then being able to go back and redraft and critique this later. I've been looking at what others have done so far. Vicki Davis blogs about her use of wikis, and you can look at a UK based example in HE at Oxford Brookes with the work of Richard Francis.

Next task is to design the assessment task for one of the MA English Literary Studies, which is currently a traditional essay, but is about to be transformed into something like a wiki portfolio. Of course this is going to have to be developed, approved and then let loose on the students, and it is dependent on being able to do simple things like purchase the laptops I need.

Watch this space! And if any of you have good ideas for innovative assessment using wikis, please do let me know.

Critical images - Juan Luis Sancez

2007-05-21T03:58:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to put a link here to my friend Juan's blog. Not only does he take gorgeous photos, but now he is critiquing them too, or at least those about Blair and Bush. For those of you into digital photography, you might like to check out Juan's website. Oh, and by the way, Juan is my claim to fame and has worked on so many prestigious projects from Star Wars to Harry Potter and much more (including the video of my wedding, now 13 years ago!). Personal bragging by proxy aside, his use of image is interesting as a multimodal aspect of blogging, and links in with some of the themes from my recent symposium.

More on blogging like a man

2007-05-21T03:35:00.000-07:00

My earlier post about the Gender Genie made me remember that I have an article by Herring and Paolillo (2006) sitting on my desk precisely about this very piece of software. Herring and Paolillo examine and extend the empirical work of Argomon and Koppel (2003), which posits a connection between the gender of the author and certain linguistic features in writing style: namely, the use of pronouns and determiners, which they map onto interactional and informational styles.

Herring and Paolillo's piece is interesting for the critique they offer of Agromon's work. Crucially Herring and Paolillo find that the linguistic features that Argomon and Koppel identify don't function as gender variables, but rather as genre variables, at least for personal and filter blogs. The implications of this are many. (1) We need to be careful about the relationship between gender and genre. How are these relationships formed? What criteria are they based on? What does this mean for language and gender studies? (2) Is it that writing on blogs really is more universalised than other forms of CMC, or is this only in respect of the linguistic features they have examined (pronouns, determiners)? What would happen if you looked at other features too?

I'm taking this further in my own work, examining a range of 'narrative-like' features in the cancer blogs in my data sample:
(1) linking (are these informational or personal)
(2) post length
(3) Evaluation (cf Labov) (so intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, external expressions of evaluation)
(4) construction of a world view, as indicated through transitivity (Halliday 1994) choices.
I also want to do a corpus based analysis of the blog entries, where I build on the work of Andrew Salway and David Herman with the corpus narratology initiative. What I like about their work is that it builds the theory from the textual analysis up, rather than pre-supposing which categories will be significant to start with.
Hmm, I seem to have my work cut out for me here. But what I am looking forward to most is finding the points of juxtaposition and connection within this analysis. And I have learned a fair bit about treatments for different kinds of cancer too.

Call for papers - Second life and education

2007-05-18T08:43:00.000-07:00

For those interested in Second Life as an environment with educational potential, you should check out the Call for Interest from the English Subject Centre. It looks like a great opportunity, especially for those in the arts and humanities.

More thoughts on transliteracy

2007-05-17T01:32:00.000-07:00

Returning to the attributes of Transliteracy debated at the Colloquium on Tuesday, I wonder if it is better to see the qualities associated with this concept, less as defining properties and more as commonly associated communicative features. To recap, the attributes are:

The ability to use and understand a range of tools
Something about
collective behaviour
Awareness of historical/cultural context
Sense of
embodiment / lifeworld
Multimodal sensibility

I have started to think of this in terms of a medical metaphor. Some syndromes, as I understand it, are diagnosed on the basis of a cluster of symptoms. So, for example, Kallman's syndrome may involve a decreased of sense of smell, bone abnormality, decrease in sex hormones affecting development during puberty (don't ask me why I know all this!). So it is possible to have Kallman's syndrome with some, but not all of the symptoms manifesting themselves. In terms of transliteracy, this might translate as some of the features being present while others are not.

In turn this begs the question of which properties are then essential (and hence defining) of transliteracy and which are not. In linguistics, it is common to distinguish between core and optional properties. This means that you can reach a 'baseline' or minimal definition where you decide that a certain property must be present in order to categorise say a word class or a genre in a particular way. Hence for narrative, a minimal definition might be that offered by Labov, as two temporally sequenced clauses where the events in the report match that of real world events. However, debates about narrativity rage about the many varied other properties that many narratives exhibit, and the extent to which a text is perceived as demonstrating narrativity varies considerably (see Ryan 2006 for an excellent discussion of this).

I wonder if we can use this principle to distinguish between core and optional qualities of transliteracy, hence refining, clarifying or confirming the current working definition. So, for me, multimodal sensibilty would be essential, as would the ability to move between tools or platforms of communication. It seems to me hard to think of examples of transliteracy that would not invoke either of these features. On the other hand, while collective behaviour is typical, it is not definitive of transliteracy (as you can be transliterate on your own, and collective behaviour need not be transliterate). The same is true, I think of the contextual awareness and lifeworld/embodiment, both of which seem to me to be facets of the same thing and closely related to the more essential properties of multimodal sensibility and using different communicative tools.

Blogging like a man

2007-05-16T07:23:00.000-07:00

I was just checking out Jess's blog and saw this fascinating post about gender genie. For those of you who don't know (yet) this is a piece of software that thinks it can guess if you are male or female on the basis of your writing style.

Guess what - apparently I blog like a man. Clearly, this is an indication that I, like Jess, am active, dynamic and able to put my point of view across clearly!

Well, those of you who know me in person can smile at that apt description!

Transliteracy Colloquim

2007-05-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended a Transliteracy Colloquim at DMU. I had a great time meeting new people and enjoying the conversations. I'm summarising here the main points from the morning presentation:

Sue Thomas argued that defining what is meant by Transliteracy is important because before you can quantify or measure something, you have to know what it is. Of course, whether or not it is desirable to measure transliteracy is a matter for debate, and it seemed that most people who were there didn't really want to do that! However, the small group I was working in later in the day developed a neat chart for looking at the effects of transliteracy, where Ted Nelson's binary paradigm of the Reader/Author contribution to a text was replaced by a continuum of participation in digital texts (which we assumed to be transliterate). At the most readerly end of the continuum is simply viewing a web page, followed by linking to it, followed by commenting, blogging, then creating collective pages (like a wiki).

Sue's definition of transliteracy can be found in the presentation she also made at the Narrative and Multimodality symposium. A briefer version is:

'Transliteracy is the ability to read write and interact (so modes of communication) across a range of platforms, tools or media'

But how wide can you go with the definition? When does it cease to become meaningful?

Much of the discussion invoked digital media, and it seems that transliteracy has become a matter of debate because of recent technological developments. Sue pointed out that transliteracy is the literacy of convergence, not just about computers but across all communication modes reading + writing + sth else? (music, you tube?) Being able to read and write is no longer enough. For me in education this raises the question of how we assess these qualities.

Sue also argued that transliteracy involves an awareness of historical and cultural context. Textual literacy so ingrained as become invisible in the western world. How else do we communicate? What are the synergies between them? This is important to me, because
how do we shift away our dependence on writing in places like a school of English? I actually think that this issue of contextualism is not definitive for transliteracy - in fact moving across from one form of literacy to another - reappropriating or mashing it seems to do away with context in a more abstract sense. I think that what she is reaching towards is that transliteracy can cause us to become more aware of our embodied experience of communication and textual forms. And as such, the text becomes more than words (as it always is), and as such, context becomes experienced in a more vital sense. Maybe.

Sue argued that transliteracy involves collective behaviour. I see the relationship between transliteracy and collaboration as one of mutual and dialectic enabling, rather than as one being a defining property of the other. I questioned whether one could be transliterate on your own? Surely you can? Similarly collective behaviour need not be translitaracy. Instead, I think the collective (web 2.0) nature of communication is both a by product and a cause of transliteracy.

A series of presentations followed from the PART team and speakers from the IOCT

Simon questioned what transliteracy can enable – is it a cognitive tool? An important point is that the pre-fix ‘trans’ implies both across or beyond? Moving across implies a plurality of literacy. For me this is both one of the most important but muddy points in this concept. How is transliteracy different from multiliteracy? In narrative studies we distinguish between the terms multimodal (meaning using more than one mode similultaneously) and transmedial (comparing or transforming across modes). I think transliteracy needs to decide whether the multimodal / muliliterate concept (and their definitions) are implicit in its own scope, and if so, how it is saying something more than this.

Kate Pullinger talked about her new project - Flight paths, which will be a Companion print / online narratives. She questioned what happens when you post first drafts of material on the web? Why shouldn’t people see behind the polish – demystify the process of writing / research and collaboration. Although it is messy - I think it can be useful to see this kind of process. I also wonder if it might sharpen some of us up in the way we carry out our work.

Chris Joseph spoke about production in transliteracy – how and why? This includes looking at the structure and forms of output (beyond and across) beyond types of textual structure – beyond narratives, generating new texts, oral /aural (narration, voice over, podcasts)
Writing to be tasted, felt, smelt, like Kate Pullinger's The Breathing wall. He pointed out that types of productive communication / collaboration suggest a shift from monologue to dialogue, again alluding to web 2.0 (eg a million penguins) He posed the important question of why particular transliteral forms are created? What power relations are put into play?

Jess Laccetti spoke about Transliteracy and multimodality, arguing that the online environment shows the transliteracy very clearly. She showed a sample of digital writing, indicating that hypertextual reading is multidirectional, not just straight left to right, up through down, and can invoke multimodality. Further questions from me are why does this matter? Do we process it differently from other texts? What difference does that make in the classroom? What does it tell us about offline texts?

Bruce Mason compared Transliteracy / culture / communication as an object of study and Transliteracy as a research tool (lens through which we look at culture).
He suggested that in the process of transliteration we should ask how we take our nderstanding of one mode of study and then transfer it to sth new to us? In particular he argued that we might look at existing studies of literacy, and note that these involve more than the skills of reading and writing but also the social meanings of literacy. How people encounter new literacies or struggle with them are important, and the plethera of new modes of communication + new affordances allow us to see existing forms in a new light.

Bruce raised the point that terms used in one field of study (taking the term 'publish') can carry different currency when transferred into another domain. The value implications of this are important, as are the misunderstandings that arise then the translation doesn't quite work. Lost in transliteration?

Simon Mills raised some significant points about how technology, text and perception are related and embedded in wider philosophical and political issues, asking 'Why transliteracy now?' He claimed that new tools engender new processes and the way we perceive the world. This involved not just the ability to use technologies but the practice of technology use – is this the same thing? The example given was how we experience time and space – how is this changed by technology (clocks, calendars) disorientation? He claimed that digital media – a new form of memory – allow us to experience memory over and over again, suggesting that this is a form of technologies of the spirit, and drawing on the concept of tertiary retention.

Mohamed Ibrahim spoke of the importance of the prefix ‘Trans’ meaning 'across', because of its implied plurality, especially multiculturalism. He argued that cross disciplinary research needs common vocabulary with clear grounding, and that this was especially true for human centred activity – the humanities and natural science. Suggesting that AI does not help us understand how humans think and behave, and questioning what the term ‘design’ means in different disciplines. Of course this has happened with the narrative turn too. It is pretty clear to me that multiple meanings of narrative translate in very different ways.

What implications does this have? Can we go across the divide and talk to each other in meaningful ways? We still need the divides in order to define who we are – but these surely should not be barriers that keep people out or stop forging new synergies. When we put the same word into different contexts and discover what it means to someone else, does it then mean that we dismiss it (oh, I didn’t mean it like that) or could we use this more productively to examine critically our own use of the term, make our assumptions and practices more visible, learn from the weaknesses and limitations and strengthen our understanding of how the environment as a whole works?

In the Q/A session that followed lunch some of the questions were:
How/why does the tran in transliteracy help us going from between, across to beyond? Can it help us to think about what is further ahead (for example how might 2-D immersion say on the web, 2nd life etc become multidimensional and more embodied?
How do we see transliteracy in a diachronic perspective?
What is the utility value of transliteracy, and why now?
How is ‘trans’ different from ‘multi’?
How does transliteracy relate to immersion and how in turn does this relate to deep and surface learning?
Maybe it is the speed, scale interactivity audience that is different with the digital media, and this is why transliteracy is arising as a topic of discussion now?

Is the use of digital technology and cyberspace resulting in an almost groundless experience?

The day was very productive for me. I came away with lots of thoughts I need to explore further. Watch this space.

Social Networks and blogging

2007-05-10T03:08:00.000-07:00

In between seeing my undergrads about their end of term projects, I'm getting stuck in to the analysis of the 'Cancer blogs' and reading more about blogging in general. Courtesy of another of my students (thank you Cassie), I came across Stephanie Nilsson's essay:
The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in Research Weblogs. While it's getting a little out of date already (there is no date on the essay, but it looks like it was written 2003-04 from the dates on the blogs posts referenced), there are some interesting ideas here. The most relevant to me are the notion of hyperlinks being categorised into informational and personal, and the capacity these have to establish social networks. Although Nilsson emphasises the significance of the hyperlinks over and above linguistic content as a means of establishing a social network, Herring et al.'s (2006) paper I discussed in the last post, indicated that linking is becoming less prolific in blogs over time. In my own work, I'm interested in whether women and men use these links in similar or different ways. Do women use more personal links, and men more informational (that good old stereotype of collaborative speech styles as feminine)?
For reference: the bibliography from which Nilsson's essay is taken is also a little out of date, but still a useful point of reference.

Back to the research on blogs

2007-05-04T06:45:00.000-07:00

I'm back to reading the research literature on blogging, which seems to have increased just in the few months while I've been doing phase 1 of the analysis of my sample of cancer blogs. The end of term projects my students are doing are fascinating here, and it is they who alerted me to some recent work that Susan Herring has generously put on her web pages. This morning I was reading

A Longitudinal Content of Weblogs: 2003-04 (In Press) In M. Tremayne (ed.) Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media. London: Routledge.

Some of the findings that Herring et al report are particularly interesting, especially that in the period they sampled, the blogs appeared to become increasingly text based, and that the linking remained relatively infrequent. This is interesting to me, first because the textual nature of blogs justifies the kind of linguistic analysis I've been doing on them. Second, the issue of linking and connection is really important to me, both in relation to the claims of web 2.0 philosophy (for want of a better way of putting it) but also because of the gendered potential here. In my sample the links are unevenly distributed (I've got to finish coding the whole lot yet, anyway, so this is an approximation), but I hypothesise that the women might link more to each other, while the men link to sources of information (that old community v. information binary).

Narrative and Multimodality Symposium

2007-04-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

The Narrative and Multimodality Symposium has now taken place. It was a very full event, with a range of papers that spanned concerns with modes, media and narrative in both hi-tech and low-tech forms. The plenary speakers were David Herman, Michael Toolan, and Sue Thomas, all of whom delivered top class papers which got us talking about all sorts of things from the Hulk through to hypertext.

You can check out Jess's blog about more of the presentations. There were too many highlights for me to put them all here, but it was a memorable occasion that has provoked many issues to be explored further. For example, what is the common ground between researchers who are working in 'hi-tech' narrative/multimodal areas (represented by papers given by Helena Barbas, Sarah Hatton & Melissa McGurgan, Hans Rustad, Sonia Fizek, Jess Laccetti, Astrid Ensslin) and more traditional fields of stylistics and narrative analysis (represented by Alison Gibbons, Rocio Monotoro, Ulf Cronquist, Jeremy Scott, Fiona Doloughan and others). Are they next-door neighbours? What's the relationship between theory and practice in these fields? How does or can one area inform the other, and is that a one-way transfer?

The workshop on using new media narratives in teaching was my contribution to bringing these issues into focus. The wiki as it now stands will give you a feeling of some of the things that got discussed, and the bio page is a neat way of seeing in more detail some of the conference delegates. The wiki will continue to run for a while yet, both to update on the workshop strands themselves and to collate more information on pedagogic projects. I'm going to write up the whole experience of using the wiki, it's narrative and multimodal, pedagogic aspects and so on as a chapter for the edited collection that will come together from the symposium.

In the meantime, if you want to capture a flavour of the event in pictures, check out Jess's flickr page for the symposium.

Ubiquitous Computing

2007-04-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today I taught a class on 'language and technology' to my second year undergraduates. It was good fun and they seemed to engage with the topic enthusiastically. It made me realise just how dramatically recent changes in digital technology have altered our expectations and forms of interaction. I described to the students my experience of being an undergraduate, where if I wanted to call home, or my boyfriend or whatever (especially the whatever), I would skip my meal in the hall of residence and wait to use one of the three pay phones (shared by 300 of us!). Apart from the fact this made me feel like a dinosaur, (maybe that should be my second life avatar), it also brought home just how far our experiences of communication in this part of the western world have changed. I asked them how long they would expect to wait for a response to an email (2 days max) and for a text message (instantly, that day at least).

What was also interesting was their varying familiarity with the forms of technology and their attendant literacies. So while txtin was oh so familiar to all, altering the spelling (and even the speech) of the students, the world of blogs, wikis, even my space was definitely not familiar or comfortable territory. The wiki for the workshop at the Narrative and Multimodality symposium is now live, and I am watching it with curiousity (and terror!). I asked the students how they would have felt if I had asked them to use a wiki in the module we've just been taking together. Their instant reaction - 'I don't even know what one of those is'. I know that using the wiki for the symposium is a new venture, and I am experiencing the 'fear of the unknown'. But who knows, in 15 years time, what forms of online collaboration will be as readily familiar as email and texting are to us now?

gender, role play and gaming

2007-04-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine read the last post on second life, and suggested that I might find the game Nights at the Circus recently, and the students were interrogating these ideas in relation to the literary text. I wonder what they would have made of it if they had actually role-played those concepts of inversion? Would experience or play have altered their perception of the politics?

Second Life

2007-04-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

For a while now my other (and better) half has been exploring second life. I've resisted creating a second life 'me' so far, but I reckon the day is not far off when I have to really get into this. Why? Because people I know keep letting me know what their second life double is called. And Gavin has taken huge delight in finding Angela Thomas there, whose work I check out from time to time. So I'm starting to feel like perhaps I really ought to find out more.

From an academic point of view, I used Second Life when I was teaching my language and gender module last semester to explore gender switching, role play, going beyond gender binaries, aka Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto. Incidentally, that class seemed to inspire quite a few of the students who are now doing end of semester research projects looking blogging, gender, ethnicity and a whole range of interesting things. I wonder how storytelling takes place in Second Life? I wonder whether narrativity can be stretched so far that the virtual world of Second Life can be treated as a kind of narrative world. What would Ryan's work on possible worlds and interactivity have to say about it?

From a non-academic point of view, I know Second Life has a lot to answer for when I ask my four-year old where his sister and dad are and he tells me they are on the computer, having a conversation with a squirrel in a cafe. For me, that actually opens up one of the interesting aspects of Second Life - the playfulness and its relationship to real world contexts. In the meantime, the blogging analysis continues, with or without the squirrel in the cafe.

Workshop wiki

2007-03-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

I am feeling a small (well, maybe a little bigger than small) sense of satisfaction in having built the wiki for the Teaching Narrative Workshop at the forthcoming symposium. As a techno-novice, it turned out to be easier than I thought. The next step is sending it out to the conference delegates and letting them (getting them to? - oh me of little faith) use it.

I have also been working on the analysis of my cancer blog corpus. It has taken me much much longer to do the linguistic analysis than I thought. I am now planning two papers from this, and need the discipline to sit down and get started on the actual writing, which is probably the bit I enjoy the most. I've worked on the women's blogs first, and at a first glance, the research that suggests that women write longer blog posts than men seems to be true so far. I'm really glad about that, because hopefully that means it won't take so long to work through the men's entries. No doubt there will be more on that later.

SSNL conference

2007-03-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

I am just back from attending the SSNL conference out in Washington DC. It was an excellent event with lots and lots of interesting papers and a great opportunity to meet with old friends and make some new ones. Although the conference has a really strong literary emphasis, there were several panels that dealt with narratives in digital media.

I was struck once again by the multiple ways we can approach narrative analysis. The papers I went to were really about the changing relationship(s) between text creators and their readers, but my challenge was to reconsider how these changing relationships change the shape of the texts themselves. As a linguist, I am interested in the language that gets used - for example, how this is the same as or different to offline communication (written, oral), but I have also been thinking that for my blog project that this is not enough. So I am starting to think about how linking is both an intertextual and interpersonal phenomenon and how this in turn might alter narrative shapes.

Workshop preparation

2007-03-09T06:24:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to prepare for a workshop I am running as part of the Narrative Symposium at UCE later this Spring. I spent some time yesterday with Sue Thomas and Bruce Mason over at DMU talking through possibilities, and picking their brains for formats, approaches and sample texts. The aims of the workshop are:

to increase awareness of the diverse range of narrative forms being exploited in new media
to think about how these challenge ideas of what narrative is and can do
to develop ideas for using this in pedagogic contexts.

The workshop will have a pre-symposium element, where delegates can collaborate beforehand on these topics, then have the face-to-face meeting, then have a post-symposium 'write-up'. I am now venturing into the world of wiki as a platform for the pre and post symposium collaborations. Part of me is really excited about what possibilities this holds for shaping new developments between colleauges, changing the way we in the humanities often teach paper/text oriented subjects, and breaking down academic barriers of all kinds. Another part of me is scared that it is not going to work!

The challenges are many: not least, seeing the extent to which the delegates will be willing to be transliterate, to explore territory which is perhaps not their own, to find time to do something 'extra' as well as the research, teaching, administration and administration and oh, did I forget to mention it, administration? Maybe I am being a little pessimistic here. Maybe everyone will come on board swimmingly. I am determined to have great fun and learn a lot in the process anyway.

Gender, blogs and discussion lists

2007-02-28T06:41:00.000-08:00

Last week I taught a session on language, gender and technology. As part of their activities, the students read and discussed Susan Herring's (2003) work on gender and CMC, then went away and looked through a range of discussion forums and blogs to see how far they could find evidence that supported or challenged her claims. Most of the students looked at discussion lists, I think because they are more familiar with these than with blogs) but some looked at blogs too. What was most interesting was that one of Herring's claims was that men contributed more frequently to academic discussion lists than women did. So the students looked at the length of postings and number of contributions. While they did find that men dominated the discussion lists in most cases, when it came to personal blogs, women wrote more than the men did. One student then asked why it was that we attribute dominance to men's interventions in discussion lists and not to greater length of entries written by women in their blogs. My response was that this was more to do with the value judgements we make about (a) genres and (b) gender and (c) types of interaction. Is it the case that personal blogging is feminized, and so having a greater presence in cyberspace in this mode doesn't count for so much?

Collaborative Narrative: The Wiki novel

2007-02-22T03:27:00.000-08:00

My knowledge and encounters with digital narratives are painfully limited. But last night I came across a project involving the ioct guys at dmu along with Penguin publishers. This is the wikinovel A Million Penguins. For me, this was fascinating to see the polymorphous, polyphonic nature of the collaborative writing. Even more so was the comment on the blog that users should not try to read it like a conventional narrative, and instead just dip in for 10 minutes or so at a time.

I've got to spend more time looking at the comments and discussions people are having about this, because my experience was that students really did not like this kind of reading experience. The power of print conventions and the actually experience of reading online made hypertextual reading really frustrating for the students I was working with. An initial summary of some of this project is in my book. I've just been showing some of my current students a million penguins, so it will be interesting to see what they make of it too.

Blogging, ethics, research and emotion

2007-02-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

This post is my initial thoughts on the vulnerabilities of blogging. I carried on reading Bruns and Jacobs' collection, including Jill Walker's piece, which I really enjoyed. Not least because it broke with academic convention and there was a sense of personal voice there which I don't tend to see so much in the academic writing. One point she made was about the lack of control there is in blogging, in so far as an unknown audience can assume knowledge of the blogger as an individual. It is one of those strange things that someone unknown to me, might be reading this and then bump into me in an unpredicted context. This, no doubt, is a risk that any blogger takes in putting their thoughts 'out there' (or rather 'out here'). And I guess, I have deliberately kept any references to my personal life, my family, kids separate from this blog (incidentally we do have a family blog, languishing, unupdated out there in the blogosphere).

So far, so uncontentious. But this morning I started doing some serious sifting through blogs as I have begun to think about the data I want to look at for my 'blogs and research paper'. I had the idea some months ago that I would look at personal blogs - the idea being to redress the balance pointed out by Herring et al (2004) that personal blogs, whilst being the fastest growing genre in the blogosphere are the least researched. Well, I thought I would delimit this a bit and look at blogs written by people who are battling cancer. So I started looking, and there are many blogs that come under this category. They are moving, honest, intimate, painful. And as I sat there with tears running down my face time and again I realised that the personal element of these stories is completely unescapable. And the writing was amazing in so many of these texts, but I also felt deeply uncomfortable as a stranger looking into the most personal expression of these people's lives. So if I am going to go ahead with this, I have letters and emails to write, seeking permission to use extracts from the blogs - clearly, although the material is so easily accessible in the public domain, there are ethics involved here. I would not like this blog reproduced, analysed by some unknown academic so I certainly would not inflict that on someone else.

And that said aside, it made me realise afresh that the division between the personal and the professional is illusory. For a long time I felt that my academic research was quite separate from the personal 'me'. A year or so back, someone said to me that my research was deeply bound up with who I am. And I have begun to realise that that is true - not just in terms of my interests, or the relationships that lie behind the data that I sometimes collect (always with consent, of course!). But the emotional reaction I had reading through these blogs this morning caught me unawares. How I work that through alongside the academic questions of blogging remains to be seen.

Blogs and gender

2007-02-16T03:22:00.000-08:00

I've just been reading Susan Herring (et al)'s piece, 'Women and Children Last', both in preparation for a class I am teaching on language, gender and technology and whilst thinking about a paper I am going to write about blogging, gender and identity. While I have been teaching about feminist stylistics and textual feminism, I have been trying to explain the principle that academic research is not some kind of objective, neutral form of observation that simply describes data 'as it is'. As is well known, all analysis is inevitably selective and partial. What Herring et al point out so well that as far as the blogosphere seems to be concerned, the research up to the point at which this group were writing (2003/04) a fairly uncontested masculinist dominance appears. I wonder if this is still the case. Bruns and Jacobs' collection had a wide range of contributors (although about half as many female writers as male), and the pieces about gender was written by a woman. Does this, should this, make any difference? I should point out, that I am not suggesting that the editors of the collection are sexist in any way shape or form (or that the gender of the writer should have made any difference to their contribution). More that I wonder how far the apparently democratizing potential of blogging maps on to academic discussion and how both of those in turn are embedded in the gender politics of social realities.

On the uses of blogs

2007-02-05T02:33:00.000-08:00

Well, I've finally made it back to using this blog. At last I'm starting to get into the reading and thinking for a new paper I'm working on. I've been waiting to get my hands on Uses of Blogs for a while now. This morning I've sat and read the chapters by Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess and Angela Thomas, all of which have got me thinking both about my own project, my own approach to blogging and how I use technology in my teaching and learning.

On my own use of this blog....
I was struck by what Jean Burgess wrote about the challenge of 'finding a voice'. She writes: 'it proved extremely difficult for many students to find a writerly voice other than their most formal 'essay' voice, or a personal voice other than their most casual 'email' voice" (p.109). That resonated with my own feelings about this blog. My intention for using this space was primarily work-driven: to create a space where I could both collect my thoughts, but potentially, engage with the 'blogging community / gurus' who are 'out there'. Given that I'm starting to look at blogs in my own research, then it seemed crazy not to have had at least some experience of being part of that community.

But when it comes to writing here, I don't want to use my 'formal' 'essay writing' voice. I know the purpose is to stimulate academic debate and so on, but my initial reactions and responses that are here don't come fully formed as essay rhetoric. Maybe, because despite some claims to the contrary (my daughter decided that I was a glossary the other day) I don't speak or think in academic-ese. In that sense, then, my experience of blogging makes me recognise the immediacy of the communication. But, on the other hand, I know that this is going into the public domain (although I am not sure anyone is going to read this!). And that makes me feel slightly uncomfortable about not using an academic voice.

I think Jean Burgess is right - using Blogs requires a new form of literacy with social and textual dimemsions that take some getting used to. And it is for that reason I haven't launched into using them in my teaching yet. But I am thinking about how I could put blogging to use in the teaching workshop that is going to be part of the Narrative Symposium I'm organising. More thoughts on that here later.

Virtual, possible, other worlds

2006-12-08T04:53:00.000-08:00

This post is not really about narrative as such. But as my husband has got into exploring second life I thought I better put something about it here. In narrative theory, the trope of the world has become increasingly explored, with text world theory, possible world theory, storyworlds and so on. Why is this? What is it about the notion of a 'world' that is so attractive and topical? In part, the narrative work is clearly a reflection of the interdisciplinary influence of artificial intelligence, philosophy and computer science, it is part of the 'cognitive turn' in narratology, and more broadly the increasingly diffuse contextualisation of narrative. But maybe it is all the more salient because of the new media technologies where gaming, virtual realities and the mutliplicities of hypertextual narratives (or at least some of them) encourage us to conceptualise this as part of our 'everyday' 'real world' environments. Well, that's my thought for today.

Narratives, digital media and creative writing

2006-12-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

Well, having been submerged in numerous projects, I've finally got back to this. I found the work of the N-Lab, while looking at Sue Thomas's impressive array of research projects. I'm not a creative writer at all, but the workshop in June looks really interesting. I've also been thinking about how I can use more storytelling in my own teaching, and how digital technology can both be a vehicle and stimulus for this. At the minute, my use of technology in teaching is really a text repository that students can interact with, linked with a series of discussion forums. But, to be honest, this has not really been that successful, or at least not in the way that I would like it to be. I don't really feel like a 'techie' person, but am constantly haunted by the sense that there is so much digital material 'out there' that I could integrate much more successfully than I already do.

Blogs, multimodality and corporeality

2006-11-17T06:36:00.000-08:00

I've now finished reading Serfaty's (2004) book on online diaries. Her penultimate chapter on 'male and female cyberbodies' got me thinking again about what images are actually doing in blogs. She discusses many different functions of the images (as a form of romanticising the narrative, as a comment on or stimulus for textual comment and so on) but also as an extra layer of representation, created selectively which simultaneously evokes authenticity and superficiality, deconstructing the boundary between the public and private. In the project that I am about to start working on, I wonder then, how images will be used. Will photos be present in blogs where people are writing about their illness? Will the images be a commentary, or constitute a narrative in their own right? I also wonder to what extent the multimodal possibilities of blogging and myspace are being used to create specific generic effects. The classic 'my space image' of the digital self portrait is a good case in point, which is now so well recognised as to be a generic marker. But what does it say about the social function and virtual community of those using myspace?

Blogs, narrative and multimodality

2006-11-16T00:23:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the IGALA conference in Spain, and now I've finally got around to doing some reading about blogs. The book I've started with is Viviane Serfaty's The Mirror and the Veil. She makes an interesting point about the multimodality of online diaries, where she writes,
'

..pictures, drawings and sometimes even audio files are produced alongside the
written text [...] they add a new, external scene to the inner scene the writing
delineates. Thus pictures accentuate the need for yet more explanations,
interpretations, yet more writing. Pictures constitute another system of
signs that reifies the body, turns it into the Other, and requires from the
diarists a further investment in the written word if they are to make sense of
themselves' (2003:28).

Serfaty's comments seem to imply that the multimodality of online diaries (which is more or less synonymous to a personal blog in her terms) introduces an element of open-endedness and fragmentation that is in diametric opposition to the linearity of conventional narrativity.

This connects with a discussion that took place on the PALA Narrative SIG discussion list earlier this year. We debated what role the images in blogs played in constructing (or undermining) the drive towards narrativity. Of course, images and their relationship to the text in the blog can be of many different kinds, refer in different ways and so on, but the question of image and narrative, especially as they are embedded in blog genres seems to open up central questions of what multimodality implies for narrative. As an example of part of the discussion, I quote from Chantelle Warner here,

In response to Ruth's question "to which the image can tell a story in itself,
or whether it is always subordinate to a verbal element," I thought of this type
of "food" blog, where people record a sort of limited autobiography through
images of what they have eaten that day. http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/
In most of the cases here, I think the verbal text is more subordinated to images,
although they don't necessarily tell a story on their own. (Posted to the
PALA Narrative Discussion list, (31 March 2006).

So, as I start to prepare the next phase of my work, I certainly have more questions about how the multimodality of blogs both influences our sense of the genre as narrative-like, and also how both these factors work towards constructing a sense of self.

Blogs and story genres

2006-11-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

I have been pondering the question of whether blogs are narrative or not, and I think a better way around this might be to consider blogs as a platform of communication which can sustain different story genres. I've written about conversational story genres in personal stories (sorry you need a subscription to view this, but you can email me for a copy) and wonder if similar things happen in online communication too. Thus the anecdotes, exemplums, recounts of everyday life (along with the more conventionally plotted stories) might flourish within blog posts, rather than the blog itself being a meta narrative (although I guess this could happen too). This leads me to ask whether the kinds of storytelling practices from face-to-face narratives get carried over into CMC, and if so, to what extent, how this copes with the multimodal transition, recontextualisation into an online environment and so on.

I'm off to IGALA4 tomorrow, so hopefully there might be some papers about blogs and gender there.