Last week, or maybe the week before DrJoolz called me on the mobile about the paper. What was interesting was her comment about being ‘stuck in the middle’. She said something like ‘you know, that point when you don’t think it’ll ever get finished.’ That’s what I like about collaborative working – learning from each other about what it’s actually like! Her comment captured a very familiar feeling.
Now, a bit further on it feels like we’re working our way through the middle. The end isn’t quite in sight, but it’s imaginable! One of the interesting things that’s dawned on me is that we don’t need to tidy up/agree on things. If our super-ordinate categories are suitably robust our individual bloggings and meta-bloggings can afford to be out of harmony. In fact it would be more likely that they would be, at least some of the time.
From the methods bit, I’m putting up this draft paragraph, because I’ve been talking to various people about research positions in studying digital culture. Here goes:
If the complex interactions between people and machines lie at the heart of communication through digital writing, methodological questions about the nature of enquiry and the position of researchers are equally important. Existing work in the field of digital writing shows how researchers can adopt a number of possible relationships to the digital culture they study. This suggests that it may be possible to identify specific research positions. The list below shows our emerging ideas in relationship to these and we recognise that these may overlap, shift or indeed expand.
• Researcher as identifier of new tropes (Ito,1995; Rheingold, 2003; Lankshear and Knobel, 2004)
• Researcher as insider (Markham,1998; Sunden, 2002)
• Researcher as analyst (Werry, 1996; Shortis, 2001; Burnett et al, 2004)
• Researcher as both subject and object (Mortensen and Walker, 2002; Guy and DrJoolz, this paper)
• Researcher as activist (Gee, 2004; Prensky, 2001)
