Blending blogging into an academic text

Document: https://doc.novay.nl/dsweb/Get/Document-90136

Author(s): Efimova, L.

Published: Paper for the workshop IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge at Internet Research 9.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-18 October 2008

Publication no.: TI/SS/2008/027

Projectreference: Iceberg/2008

Summary: For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. As I work on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, blending blogging into an academic text to bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me, this paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it and then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.

Keywords: weblog research, writing, ethics