Weblog as a personal thinking space

Link to online publication: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557963

Author(s): Efimova, L.

Published: In HT'09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM.

© ACM, 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in HT'09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557963

Publication no.: Novay/SS/2009/008

Projectreference: Iceberg 2009

Summary: While weblogs have been conceptualised as personal thinking spaces since their early days, those uses have not been studied in detail. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a weblog can contribute to the process of developing ideas in a long-term complex project. To do so I use autoethnography to reconstruct my personal blogging practices in relation to developing PhD ideas from two perspectives. I first discuss my practices of using a weblog as a personal information management tool and then analyse its uses at different stages in the process of working on a PhD dissertation: dealing with fuzzy insights, sense-making and turning ideas into a dissertation text. The findings illustrate that next to supporting thinking in a way private notebooks do, a weblog might serve similar roles as papers on one's office desk: dealing with emerging insights and difficult to categorise ideas, while at the same time creating opportunities for accidental feedback and impressing those who drop by.

Keywords: autoethnography, electronic notebooks, personal information management, weblogs, writing