The Language of Blogs

Printed blogs

Last week the excellent On the Media (a radio programme and podcast from NPR station WNYC) had an item about The Printed Blog.  This is the reverse of print newspapers that start an on-line version and have their reporters blog;  instead, it is an experiment with taking blog reports, printing them, and distributing them like a newspaper.  Yeah, I thought it an odd idea too.  In my experience, prose that seems great when I see it on-line, freshly written, seems odd in print, either in a book or in a newspaper.  But Josh Karp, the publisher who was interviewed, had a case, saying it allowed for micro-editions that could sell ads specifically for one neighbourhood or another.  And he mentioned something that proponents of print often point out, the convenience and feel of paper.  For all my fascination with blogs, and the excellent writers emerging on them, I still read the weekly version of the Guardian, and among its many pleasures is the way it lies flat on the table.

Bibliography on the language of blogs

This is the Reference list from Blog and Wiki Discourse (Continuum, forthcoming in August).  I've cut all the references to linguistic and media studies texts that don't refer to blogs or wikis.  This includes only studies to which I refer in the text, so it is not a complete bibliography of the field, but it may give some readers ideas of new places to look.  Daniel Holbrook has a much more comprehensive but now dated list from his thesis (and it is an interesting example of how a web-based bibliography can work). 

Allan, S. (2006). Online news:  Journalism and the Internet. Maidenhead, UK, Open University Press.

Baker, N. (2008). The Charms of Wikipedia:  Review of Wikipedia:  The Missing Manual. New York Review of Books 55(4): 6-10.

Baker, S. and H. Green (2008). Beyond blogs:  What business needs to know. Business Week.

Blood, R. (2002a). Introduction. We've Got Blog. J. Rodzvilla. Cambridge, Perseus Publishing: ix-xiii.

Blood, R. (2002b). The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Cambridge, MA, Perseus.

Blood, R. (2002c). Weblogs:  A history and perspective. We've Got Blog. J. Rodzvilla. Cambridge, MA, Perseus Publishing: 7-16. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Boardman, M. (2005). The Language of Websites. London, Routledge.

Broughton, J. (2008). Wikipedia:  The Missing Manual. Sebastopol, CA, O'Reilly Media.

Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. New York, Peter Lang.

Bruns, A. and J. Jacobs, Eds. (2006). Uses of Blogs. New York, Peter Lang.

Bryant, S., A. Forte, et al. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. Group '05. www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/bryant-forte-bruckman-group05.pdf

Crystal, D. (2006). Language and the Internet. (Second Edition) Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

de Moor, A. and L. Efimova (2004). An Argumentation analysis of weblog conversations. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Language-Action Perspective in Communication Modelling, New Brunswick, NJ.https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-41656/lap2004_demoor_efimova.pdf

Doctorow, C., R. Dornfest, et al. (2002). Essential Blogging. Sebastopol, CA, O'Reilly & Associates.

Emigh, W. and S. Herring (2005). Collaborative authoring on the web:  A genre analysis fo two on-line encyclopedias. HICSS - 38, IEEE Press

Gillmor, D. (2004). We the Media. Sebastapol, CA, O'Reilly Media.

Gurak, L. J., S. Antonijevic, et al., Eds. (2004). Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/.

Herring, S. C., I. Kouper, et al. (2005). Conversations in the blogosphere: An analysis "from the bottom up". Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38), IEEE.http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/blogconv.pdf

Herring, S. C. and J. C. Paolillo (2006). Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 439-459.

Herring, S. C., L. A. Scheidt, et al. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37), IEEE.http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf

Hewitt, H. (2005). Blog:  Understanding the Information Revolution that's Changing Your World. Nashville, TN, Nelson Books.

Jones, J. (2008). Patterns of revision in on-line writing:  A study of Wikipedia's featured articles. Written Communication 25(2): 262-289.

Keren, M. (2006). Blogosphere:  The New Political Arena. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.

Kline, D. and D. Burstein (2005). Blog!  How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture. New York, CDS Books.

Kluth, A. (2006). Among the audience:  A survey of New Media. The Economist. 22 April.  http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=6794156

Kumar, R., J. Novak, et al. (2004). Structure and Evolution of Blogspace. Communications of the ACM 47(12): 35-39.

Lanier, J. (2006). Digital Maoism: The hazards of the new online collectivism. The Edge. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

Marlow, C. (2004). Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. International Communication Association, New Orleans.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.html

Marlow, C. (2006). Linking without thinking: Weblogs, readership and online social capital formation. International Communication Association Conference, Dresden, Germany.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/2006-linking-without-thinking

McHenry, R. (2004). The Faith-Based Encyclopedia. TCSDaily:  Technology, Commerce, Society.  http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111504A 

Miller, C. and D. Shepherd (2004). Blogging as social action:  A genre analysis of the weblog. Into the Blogosphere:  Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. L. J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff and J. Reyman.

Miller, D. and D. Slater (2000). The Internet:  An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford, Berg.

Nilsson, S. (2004). A brief overview of linguistic aspects of the blogophere, English Department, Umeå University. http://ilyagram.org/media/fetch/blogspeak.pdf

Nowson, S. (2006). The Language of Weblogs:  A Study of Genre and Individual Differences. School of Informatics. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh.

O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/1113http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Pfeil, U., P. Zaphiris, et al. (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1).

Posteguillo, S. (2003). Netlinguistics:  An Analytical Framework to Study Language, Discourse and Ideology in Internet. Castelló de la Plana, Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I.

Priedhorsky, R., J. Chen, et al. (2007). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. Group '07, Sanibel Island, Florida.http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf

Project for Excellence in Journalism (2006). The State of the News Media.  http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/

Rodzvilla, J., Ed. (2002). We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture. Cambridge, MA, Perseus Books.

Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can History Be Open Source?  Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History: 117-146.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody:  The Power of Organizing without Organizations. London, Allen Lane.

Singer, J. B. (2006). Journalists and news bloggers:  Complements, contradictions, and challenges. The Uses of Blogs. A. Bruns and J. Jacobs. New York, Peter Lang: 23-32.

Stone, B. (2004). Who Let the Blogs Out?:  A Hyperconnected Peek a the World of Weblogs. New York, St. Martins.

Thelwall, M. (2003). What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic hyperlink creation. Information Research 8(3): 151.

Tosca, S. P. (2000). A Pragmatics of Links. Journal of Digital Information 1(6): Article No. 22, 2000-06-27.  http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v01/i06/Pajares/

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between  authors with history flow visualisations. CHI 2004.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2007). Talk before you type: coordination in Wikipedia. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/wikipedia_coordination_final.pdf

 

Since then

I sent the book manuscript to Continuum on 21 November (almost three months late).  As you can see, I didn't do much updating of the blog when I was revising the manuscript.  I'll use it from now on to add references I missed and new links. 

I started this book in summer 2006.  I noticed in the last stages of the book how much the blogs had changed in two years.  Some slowed down or stopped.  Baghdad Burning posted less and less, as the dramatic events of 2003 moved into the depressing day-to-day tit-for-tat killings of 2005, ending finally with poignant posts on her emigration to Syria in October 2007, a year ago.  The Head Heeb, whose informed comments on African politics had drawn a large following, quit to spend more time on his law practice;  his more recent posts vanished from Blogmosis, leaving only early posts still on his earlier host, Blogspot, and reminding us of the fragility of this medium.  (Librarians who archive selected blogs will be doing academics a great service).  Dr. Dave keeps threatening to quit posting on his public blog at unknowngenius.com, continuing only with a blog known to a few friends, but he keeps up occasional posts, and a keitai log of evocative mobile phone photos.  Now he has actually started work on a PhD (so he doesn't use the joking 'Dr' tag anymore), and it seems to involve linguistics;  I probably wouldn't have dared comment on his blog had I known he would be studying Rhetorical Structure Theory.

Many of the blogs I have been following have changed address:  India Uncut and Israeli Mom moved from Blogspot's free hosting service to their own URLs, as they gained more traffic and wanted more control over format, while Cosmic Variance has moved from its own site to being one of several blogs hosted by Discover magazine.  Language Log moved to a new server at Penn, with an explanation about the hardware side of keeping a blog going.  Dooce redesigned her site, and she, like Instapudit and BoingBoing, now offers video material.

There have been changes in popularity, and in the ways popularity is measured.  Instapundit, the iconic political blog of 2006, seems to be way down the Technorati lists (at 938);  I don't know if that reflects some broad shift in the zeitgeist or just a technical factor in the shift from his own URL to Pajamas Media. (It remains for me the benchmark for short, witty links, posted through the day, though I am glad that his candidate did not win the 2008 election).  Dooce, meanwhile, has shot up the Technorati popularity list, at 30, the most popular of the 'parenting' category.  Though Heather Armstrong's intimate, gossipy tone sounds like she is talking to four friends over coffee, it is probably the second-most-read blog of all those I studied.   The most popular was and still is BoingBoing, now at 6 in the Technorati list, and it deserves to be;  it was alwaysthe best place on my blogroll to go when I wanted to pass a few minutes with playful notes or serious analyses of internet issues.

I found some new blogs in the course of writing the book.  I added Raising Yousuf (now Raising Yousuf and Noor) and Laila El-Haddad has been good at keeping up posts despite a difficult life as artist, mother, and migrant.  I wanted to add something from the excellent Global Voices Online, and settled on Bob Chen because he had such vivid reports of the Szechuan earthquake in spring 2008. Stephanie Booth remains interesting even when she is explicitly self-promotional (that's her job), and she does demonstrate some new technologies I need to think about, and of course I like the bilingual bits.  From the other end of the geek/newbie continuum,  I added My Mom's Blog just because it seems to be consistently well-written, in a style that is different from those of the other bloggers I study.

Some of my additions reflect my own interests.  Language Log is, of course, a resource as well as a topic for a linguist studying blogs;  some colleagues think the writing can be over-elaborate and in-groupy, but I find it remarkably consistent in mixing entertainment and serious points.  It is perhaps the great on-going popular book on linguistics to supersede Pinker.  The West End Whingers were added in pure selfishness;  I go to plays in London enough to enjoy their jokes abotu theatres and theatre-goers, though I have found their sense of humour is not everybody's cup of tea (or glass of merlot).  I have been following two different mostly-vegetarian cooking blogs, 101 Cookbooks and Chocolate & Zucchini, both of them tipped for me by Ryan Davidson, who did a BA dissertation on cookery blogs a couple years ago.  They have remained reliable sources of recipes, and I sometimes analysed and then cooked the same entry.

One of my colleagues has poined out that, while I was writing about blogs, other people in the department have been writing them.  But he didn't tell me any URLs, so I guess I can't give them a plug, or analyse their styles. Apparently they are better at keeping up with posts than I am.

So the

blogosphere changes, even in two years, and the changes are probably too fast for print to keep up.  By the time my book comes out in August 2009, many links will be dead, and some of what is now done on blogs will be done in other ways, for instance through Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube.  I will try to keep up posts for a while so that I can update it.  And I'll  continue to enjoy reading these blogs.

 

Academic Studies of Wikipedia

Am I right in thinking Wikipedia gets better studies than blogs? If it is true, it may be because it provides such great data for a study. I used to spend hours and days and weeks comparing two versions of a poem or an essay or a scientific article. So I am astonished to find that Wikipedia has a history page with all previous versions lined up (that alone can take a literary scholar weeks), and then it will compare any two versions and point out the changes. And it says who made the changes, and links to their page, where one can often find what other edits they have made. This huge body of data has been used by a group at IBM Research Laboratories to make 'History Flow' visualisations that show how an article develops (Viégas, Wattenberg and Dave 2004; Viégas, Wattenberg, Kriss and van Ham 2007). The data have also been used (along with some statistics on page views that one can't find on a Wikipedia history page) by Priedhorsky and his colleagues to show the build-up of information on articles, and the effects of vandalism (Priedhorsky, Chen, Lam, Panciera, Turveen and Riedl 2007). Pfeil, Zaphiris, and Ang correlated the kinds of changes made in the different language editions with traits of national cultures drawn from Hofstede (Pfeil, Zaphiris and Ang 2006). And John Jones has used the information in the editors' comments to categorise the kinds of revisions made (for instance, macro or micro) in featured articles and articles that didn't get FA status (Jones 2008). Emigh and Herring (2005) compare the statistics on article length, word length, and various qualitative stylistic features, for Wikipedia, Everything2 (which I hadn't heard of), and the Columbia Encyclopedia, reminding me that Wikipedia's collaborative process is not the only way to do it.

There have also been studies of authorship that go beyond this huge trove of data. Bryant, Forte, and Bruckman (2005)interviewed Wikipedians, and they show some interesting differences of perspective between novice and experienced users. Rosenzweig (2006) has a thoughtful piece that goes beyond his immediate concern, knowledge about history. (He was the first, I think, to raise issues about the style of Wikipedia entries). There have been many magazine articles on Wikipedia, but he most informative and enthusiastic is the novelist Nicholson Baker's review in the New York Review of Books, which captures some of the obsessional quality of editing (2008). He's reviewing Broughton (2008), which is more than it seems from the title, not just a user's manual, but a thoughtful guide to the phenomenon and the practices of Wikipedians. And of the many books coming out now on Wikipedia, the most interesting comments are from Alex Bruns.

And then there are the critics. Most just give a sort of gut response, without much argument or experience with wikis, but I have found interesting remarks in articles by two experienced editors of print encyclopedias (McHenry 2004; Crystal 2007), and in the comments on criticisms by Jaron Lanier (2006).

Baker, N. (2008). The Charms of Wikipedia. New York Review of Books 55(4): 6-10. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

Broughton, J. (2008). Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. Sebastopol, CA, O'Reilly Media.

Bryant, S., A. Forte, et al. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. Group '05.www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/bryant-forte-bruckman-group05.pdf

Crystal, D. (2007). On not being a speech therapist. DCBlog.  http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

Emigh, W. and S. Herring (2005). Collaborative authoring on the web: A genre analysis fo two on-line encyclopedias. HICSS - 38, IEEE Press

Jones, J. (2008). Patterns of revision in on-line writing: A study of Wikipedia's featured articles. Written Communication 25(2): 262-289

Lanier, J. (2006). Digital Maoism: The hazards of the new online collectivism. The Edge. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

McHenry, R. (2004). The Faith-Based Encyclopedia. TCSDaily: Technology, Commerce, Society. http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111504A

Pfeil, U., P. Zaphiris, et al. (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/pfeil.html

Priedhorsky, R., J. Chen, et al. (2007). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. Group '07, Sanibel Island, Florida.  http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf

Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History: 117-146

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualisations. CHI 2004

Viégas, F., M. Wattenberg, et al. (2007). Talk before you type: coordination in Wikipedia. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/wikipedia_coordination_final.pdf

Today Today Today

Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books says, 'Books and blogs, if they’re doing their jobs properly, are as different as two kinds of published text can be.'  So a print collection of blog entries, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web is 'on the face of it, an early contender for most pointless book of the year'.  This is because blogs are written and published quickly, and are open to revision and response, while books are not.  Blogs are timely:  that is why people apologise for periods without posts (none of that here), why way threads date quickly, so that it seems odd to post your comment long after everyone else, and why even very good blog entries collected in books seem so thin, thinner even than collected journalism.

Jones says that the best entries in the book are those from Samuel Pepys's diary from the 1660s.  I've now subscribed to the feed from the Samuel Pepys Diary site maintained by Phil Gyford , and I find they do indeed work well as daily e-mails, sent on the date they were written (so I find that on the corresponding date in January 1664, he had a cold too). They are about the right length (never more than a screen) and they are devoted to such details as what he had for breakfast, who was at a meeting, quick bits of sex, and (most recently) lying awake all night because he thinks burglars might get in.  The e-mailed entries work so well that I can't imagine reading them straight through in bound volumes (though I may try listening to the audiobook).  Of course Pepys was not putting his diary entries out in public, but he had set himself the daily task of recording dailiness, and that is what makes him such a good blogger.

Dailiness is also the principle of a site I've mentioned before, Bill Lamin's blog posting the letters from the front in World War by his grandfather Private Harry Lamin.   The site presents itself as Harry's blog, so on the Profile page, he lists himself as 120 years old.  This would be like any other archive of Great War letters, except that they are posted on the blog on the day corresponding to the day they were sent.  The irregularity reproduces the sense of waiting every day for news, and the uncertainty and open-endedness they had for the recipients in his family. They are not daily letters, but the blog ties us into the time of the writer, as the Pepys Diary site does. 

The excellent WNYC podcast On the Media  has twice drawn attention to a project by the Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy (and now carried on by Ruben Vives), The Homocide Report.  Leovy has been reporting the bare facts of every single homicide reported in LA County, every day (and there is, on average, more than one murder a day).  One would think any newspaper would do that, but of course any newspaper treats some murders as newsworthy, those involving notable people, photogenic victims, grisly results, or repeated patterns;  others are just items on the police blotter.  Here every victim gets more or less the same attention (depending only on how much is known in the immediate aftermath):  an area of the city and an address, the victim's name, gender, race or ethnicity, and age, a time, the cause of death, and a not very flattering photo.  The deliberate flatness of the reporting contrasts with the emotional tributes posted in the comments on some (but not all) entries, reminding us that these sometimes rather grim looking people had daughters, customers, neighbours, old friends from high school.  The Homocide Report is heartbreaking in a way a newspaper is not.  What makes it such a moral project is that the reporter gives every victim the same care and attention, every day, just as soon as they know anything at all.  No waiting to see if it is a good story, and no shaping into a rich novelistic narrative.  Different as it is, Jill Leovy's resolution has similarities with the resolutions of Phil Gyford (for Samuel Pepys) and Bill Lamin (for Private Harry Lamin), to focus on today.

Some advice on projects studying the language of blogs

Blogs make for appealing projects for students: the subject matter can be interesting, the styles are lively and personal, and the data couldn't be easier to collect (no taping and transcription). But from my experience with BA and MA students, there are some practical problems to consider, and these practical problems raise some interesting issues for discourse analysis in general.

Here are some topics studies by students at my university.

 

—Comparing news blogs to news reports – e.g.  Iraq, Katrina, a demonstration

— Uses of narrative (tense, evaluation, reported speech) in personal diaries – e.g., Bitch PhD, dooce

— Attempts of politicians to find an ethos for blogging, Facebook, and other on-line forms of presence – e.g. US Presidential candidates

— Uses of informality, for instance colloquialisms and typos in comments

— Community building (solidarity, banter, shared assumptions) – e.g., anorexics, soldiers, fans

— Evaluative language in specialist blogs – e.g., cookery blogs

— Language choice and code-switching (no longer English domination)

 

There are also language issues to study in other recent innovations in Web 2.0, such is in the comments on YouTube and on photo sharing sites.

 

Blogs provide a vast source of data already in electronic form, so it is easy to download material, save it as text, and use concordancing tools. But there are some theoretically interesting practical problems:

— As we have seen in my studies, blogs are hard to sample. There is no ‘representative sample’, so one usually has to explain a theoretically-motivated sample, as I did. One can choose the most popular, or blogs linked to each other, or blogs in some unusual form or style, or blogs on a topic.

— Students always ask how much text they need, and there is no right answer. For my chapters, I tended to go for about 10,000 words from each of ten blogs. If I wanted to make a statistical argument contrasting blogs and posts, or one kind of blog and another, I would need a much larger sample. These corpora are easy enough to collect, just cut and paste, but students are likely to blanch at the thought of analysing qualitatively 100,000 words, the length of an academic monograph.

— Students have raised the issue of just what they should cut and paste. It can be hard to collect the comments as well as the posts, because one usually has to follow the permanent links for each post, but I have shown in Chapters 4 and 7 that they can be very different kinds of texts (for instance, one is likely to find a lot more evaluative comments in posts). If one followed up trackbacks and links, one would be in for a couple days of copying and pasting, and a lot of hard choices, rather than just an hour or two.

— I copy all my texts as rtf files into qualitative analysis software, in my case Atlas-ti. One nice effect of this translation is that the links show up with the URLs, so I can tell what they are linking to. It looks messy, but it makes some kinds of analysis easier. Others analyse the texts with corpus software such as Wordsmith. For that, one needs text-only format.

— There are also ethical issues in collecting these data. I have chosen only popular blogs, where the authors obviously expected to have their words read by the widest possible audience, so I have not worried about asking their permission. But with more private blogs (for instance those in a support group for a medical condition, or those used by political dissidents), there could be serious issues of permission and confidentiality.

As I have worked on this book, I have found that, not surprisingly, many of the most useful resources are on line. Some of the main researchers on blogs have pages on blogs that give lots of papers; these are particularly useful in starting students off on their reading. I have also listed some web resources, such as Technorati, the search engine and ranking tool, and Data-Mining, which experiments with visualisations. My own blog is not updated frequently enough, but has some resources and comments as I work on the book.

 

Web sites

— my blog: http://thelanguageofblogs.typepad.com/

— Technorati – the most-used search engine for blogs - http://www.technorati.com/

— Global Voices – a carefully-edited directory translating and summarizing blogs from around the world – a good source for finding well-written blogs that give a non-US perspective - http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/

— Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualisation, and Social Media – Useful visualizations of the blogosphere by a Microsoft researcher http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/graphs/index.html

— Blog Herald – news on blogs, mostly business-related - http://www.blogherald.com/

— The Sum of My Parts – the home page of Stephanie Hendricks, who is completing a PhD on blogs - http://www.sumofmyparts.org/blog/

— Rebecca’s Pocket – Rebecca Blood’s blog links to lots of commentary on blogs - http://www.rebeccablood.net/

— Jill Walker – another academic blog by a pioneer of blogging - http://jilltxt.net/

— On the Media – the weekly WNYC (Public Broadcasting System) radio programme regularly covers blogs and new media, and has podcasts and transcripts - http://www.onthemedia.org/

— Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication – currently the best source of academic articles on blogs - http://jcmc.indiana.edu/

 

Reference

Bruns, A. and J. Jacobs, Eds. (2006). Uses of Blogs. New York, Peter Lang.

 

Blog books

Amazon writes to tell me that:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Uses of Blogs (Digital Formations) by Axel Bruns have also purchased The IT Girls Guide to Blogging with Moxie by Joelle Reeder.

That's odd.  Judging by its Amazon description, The IT Girl's Guide to Blogging with Moxie would seem to be a how-to book the with cover of a chick-lit novel, and while I am sure it has all sorts of useful technical information that I should know (and I admit to lacking moxie entirely), I don't really want another how-to book.  On the other hand, I did appreciate Uses of Blogs.  It is a collection edited by two Australian academics, Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs (the latter forgotten by the Amazon automatic message), including a wide range of contributors who know about different applications of blogs in education, the professions, business, and news.  I came to it because I was tracking down publications by Jill Walker (she has her chapter on-line). From my notes:

• Bruns, in his introduction, quotes Clay Shirky saying blogs are not one genre
• Suw Charman uses the term 'Trojan mouse' for a small scale project unnoticed by the boss, like Inkytext at my university.
• Jean Burgess notes the problem students have finding a blog voice in blogs for courses.
• Alexander Halavais replaces any definition of blogging with four themes:  blogs have networked audiences, they encourage conversation, they are a 'low-intensity activty, and they represent 'thinking in progress'. (I feel an exam question coming on:  'Discuss'.).
• Adrian Miles notes how the 'blogginess of the blog' is broken with publication in a book, out if its context, while video and audio content can servive such recontextualisation.
• And at the end, Axel Bruns has a nice quotation from Neil Gaiman that you probably know but I didn't:  'The blogosphere is not organised, but it's really well disorganised.'

So this is the closest to an academic book on blogs that I have seen so far.  It may be that the growing bookshelf on blogs is going to be like the huge bookshelf on advertising:  lots of how-to books, journalistic gee-whiz accounts, and recollections of the famous.  Good copywriters like David Ogilvy and Peter Mayle have a lot to tell non-practitioners like me, but they don't say anything specific about language, and they don't do arguments.  Eventually, advertising discourse got good textbooks like Guy Cook's, but there are still rather few monographs. Since monographs take at least five years, I will probably have to wait awhile for good extended studies of blogs.  I should probably start looking for just-about-to-be-completed PhD dissertations.

The prehistory of blogs

With construction going on around the campus, some benches have been moved into Bowland quad. One of them is dedicated to Gordon Inkster, and when I came across it yesterday, it reminded me of his wonderful innovation, the campus e-mail newsletter Inkytext, which ran from 1993 to his death in 2001 (see the tributes here). Inkster was a lecturer in the French department, and having been on the staff at the university from very near its beginnings, he had been on just about every possible committee, and had been the licensee of one of the campus bars. I’m told that before I got here, he had a column in a short-lived alternative newspaper. But like Leoš Janáček and Mary Wesley, he found his true genre late in life. Inkytext was like an early blog in many ways: the constant updating, the possibility of readers’ comments, the snapping up and recontextualisation of other texts, and the strong sense of personality and style. He kept it going via laptop even when he was intensive care. But in another sense he was too early; he had to do all this using just an e-mail list, with no blogging software to make the postings and comments easy, and no way for newcomers to get to it except by e-mailing him to subscribe. (As the masthead shows, with its list of places it was read, lots of people did just that). It was, of course, primarily for the local community, and it served as a lifeline through a university financial crisis that had many people worried about their jobs. But there were also bits of commentary, reviews of restaurants and wine, translations of songs, witty word play. I guess that (as with the best blogs) the delight in reading it on the screen, interrupting work, with all its topical references and asides, would not translate into book form.

Like any canonical invention – the telegraph, the telephone, newspapers, cinema, e-mail – blogs emerged alongside various innovations doing similar things in different ways or different things in similar ways. Bloggers themselves were quick to come up with a canonical history, summarised by Rebecca Blood as early as 2000, that goes back to 1999 and Jorn Barger or Cameron Barrett or Pyra or other early users. But before that there were literary commonplace books that brought together bits of reading in one place, and scrapbooks of various sorts. There were the personal letters that provide most of the background to the study of the 19th century, and that have almost vanished today. There were elaborate web-pages that usually seemed to ossify after a brief hopeful start. And there were pioneering uses of e-mail and discussion lists like Inkytext. Just as one begins to see proto-cinema in late 19th century novel and painting, one sees protoblogs in late 19th century uses of existing technologies. Gordon Inkster certainly had the wit, curiousity, conviction, and endless contacts of a good blogger; what he didn’t have was the technology to make his work easy. And so he didn’t have lots of other people doing the same sort of thing at the same time, and he posted usually once a week, not twice or three times a day. I’ll be looking out for other protobloggers.

I can recommend a browse in the complete Inkytext archives, maintained by Barry Rowlingson of the Lancaster University Mathematics Department.

If you don’t know where to start, I’d suggest something like Inkytext 149, in which, after a discussion of the financial crisis, he turns his attention to translating Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, for contemporary political reasons that he explains.

Searching for references on the language of blogs

Where can students find references on the language of blogs? I have noted that there are some books, but they are still mostly anecdotes and accounts from bloggers. Even the academic studies, which are slow in coming, have been useful for background but don’t provide a basis for analysis. The first literature search for most students (and last for some of them) is on Google. I have been trying to point them beyond Google, because for most topics they are better off looking at refereed academic journals with more substantial. But blogs are a newish topic in most academic fields, and it takes time for studies to work their way through the process of reviewing and publication. And the people who study blogs are, not surprisingly, good at making their work available free on the web. Most of it is in the form of conference papers, which have at least been refereed by someone.

So a Google Scholar search, with some following up of the references in the papers, and the citations to the papers, will lead to lots of interesting material. Many of the earlier papers are by well-known bloggers (Walker 2001; Blood 2004; Marlow 2004; Marlow 2006; Walker 2006). There are three problems with much of what one finds. Since they are conference papers, they tend to be short and undeveloped, an interesting concept or a bit of data. And very few of them have much to do with linguistics, even when they use words like ‘conversation’ or ‘text analysis’. Most are more interested in computer networks than in discourse. And since they are usually writing for other people in information sciences, they can be rather technical (though they do a good job at framing what they are doing for non-specialists, a lot better than most linguists do).

With those warnings in mind, here are some suggestions. The most active linguist in this area is Susan Herring, who has written and co-written and edited lots of papers on blogs, many of which are accessible from her web page at http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/pubs.html

Let me just recommend two of these papers, a careful analysis of genre that could provide a background for selection of data and for comparisons ((Herring, Scheidt, Bonus and Wright 2004) and a paper on gender that is, I think, the first on blogs in one of the main sociolinguistics or discourse analysis journals (Herring and Paolillo 2006). Two other names keep coming up in my searches, Lilia Efimova, who is doing (has done?) a PhD at the Telematica Instituut in the Netherlands (http://blog.mathemagenic.com/) and Stephanie Hendrick, who is doing a PhD at the University of Umea in Sweden (http://www.sumofmyparts.org/blog/). Their papers often touch on discourse analytical issues, but they are mainly interested in aspects of networking (Hendrick 2003; de Moor and Efimova 2004; Efimova and Hendrick 2005).

Two earlier collections of papers from different fields also provide a good basis. ‘Into the Blogosphere’ is an on-line collection from North American rhetoricians (Gurak, Antonijevic, Johnson, Ratliff and Reyman 2004). The most useful, for me, is co-authored by the genre analyst Carolyn Miller (Miller and Shepherd 2004). There is also a theme issue of Communications of the ACM (Rosenbloom 2004) with accessible articles, including an interesting overview of links (Kumar, Novak, Raghavan and Tomkins 2004).

Some journal articles are beginning to emerge in areas other than information science. It’s worth keeping an eye on the one refereed outlet dedicated to this area, the on-line Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Some recent articles on blogs include (Huffaker and Calvert 2005; Trammell, Tarkowski, Hofmokl and Sapp 2006; Tremayne, Zheng, Lee and Jeong 2006; Thelwall and Stuart 2007). Other titles thrown up by a search include (Hevern 2004; Reed 2005). And I have seen the first of what will probably be many PhD dissertations on blog texts (Mishne 2007). It is about searching blog texts, not about analysing them in relation to language practices, but it is well-written and has many useful insights for more qualitative text analysts.

I wonder if there is a lesson in this searching. It could be that most discourse analysis continues to focus on a few genres, such as political speeches, newspaper articles, scientific research articles, and broadcast news interviews. These could all be called (in a category that Bill Nichols used to talk about documentary film) ‘discourses of sobriety’. It may be that we will have to adapt these well-established lines of analysis of sober genres to more carnivalesque genres such as blogs, YouTube, or reality TV. That is why the analysis of genres is probably the first step in any comparative analysis of blogs: what are they, and what are people doing when they do them?

Blood, R. (2004). "How Blogging Software Reshaped the Online Community." Communications of the ACM. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/blog_software.html

de Moor, A. and L. Efimova (2004). An Argumentation analysis of weblog conversations. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Language-Action Perspective in Communication Modelling, New Brunswick, NJ. https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-41656/lap2004_demoor_efimova.pdf

Efimova, L. and S. Hendrick (2005). In Search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries. Communities and Technologies 05. https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-46041

Gurak, L. J., S. Antonijevic, et al., Eds. (2004). Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/.

Hendrick, S. (2003). The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in Research Weblogs. English Department, University of Umea. http://www.eng.umu.se/stephanie/web/LanguageBlogs.pdf

Herring, S. C. and J. C. Paolillo (2006). "Gender and genre variation in weblogs." Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 439-459.Preprint: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/jslx.pdf

Herring, S. C., L. A. Scheidt, et al. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37), IEEE. http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf

Hevern, V. W. (2004). "Threaded identities in cyberspace: Weblogs and positioning in the dialogical self." Identities: An International Journal of Theory and Research 4(4): 321-335

Huffaker, D. A. and S. L. Calvert (2005). "Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(2). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html

Kumar, R., J. Novak, et al. (2004). "Structure and Evolution of Blogspace." Communications of the ACM 47(12): 35-39

Marlow, C. (2004). Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. International Communication Association, New Orleans. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.html

Marlow, C. (2006). Linking without thinking: Weblogs, readership and online social capital formation. International Communication Association Conference, Dresden, Germany. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/2006-linking-without-thinking

Miller, C. and D. Shepherd (2004). Blogging as social action: A genre analysis of the weblog. Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. L. J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff and J. Reyman. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_weblog.htmlMishne, G. A. (2007). Applied Analytics for Blogs. Informatics Institute. Amsterdam, NL, University of Amsterdam. http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/phd.html

Reed, A. (2005). "'My blog is me' Texts and persons in online journal culture (and anthropology)." Ethnos 70(2): 220-242

Rosenbloom, A. (2004). "Special Issue: The Blogosphere." Communications of the ACM 47(12)

Thelwall, M. and D. Stuart (2007). "RUOK? Blogging communication technologies during crises." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(2). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue2/thelwall.html

Trammell, K. D., A. Tarkowski, et al. (2006). "Rzeczpospolita blogów [Republic of Blog]: Examining Polish bloggers through content analysis." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/trammell.html

Tremayne, M., N. Zheng, et al. (2006). "Issue publics on the web: Applying network theory to the war blogosphere." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/tremayne.html

Walker, J. (2001). Do You Think You're Part of This? Digital Texts and the Second Person Address. Cybertext Yearbook 2001. Jyväskylä, FI, University of Jyväskylä. http://hdl.handle.net/1956/1140Walker, J. (2006). Blogging from inside an ivory tower. Uses of Blogs. J. J. Axel Bruns. Bern, Peter Lang. https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/1956/1846/1/Walker-Uses-of-Blogs.pdf

Some readings about blogs

When I began this project, I had just a few academic studies of blogs, and a lot of references that weren't academic but had some insights or background.  Students usually go first to one of the textbooks on language and the internet.  Mark Boardman (2005), The Language of Websites (London:  Longman), barely mentions blogs, but the new edition of David Crystal (2006), Language and the Internet (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press) has a chapter on them.

One reference that comes up a lot in student essays, perhaps because it was for a while the only entry in our library catalogue for ‘blog’, is John Rodzvilla, ed. (2002), We’ve Got Blog (Cambridge, MA:  Perseus Press).  But it is just a collection of short pieces, mostly by bloggers, written in the first couple years of the blog phenomenon.  Parts are still useful (including Rebecca Blood’s ‘Introduction’ and ‘History’, both of which are available on her web site), but it is not much of a start for academic analysis.  Most of the other books I have seen on blogs are either how-to books, such as Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelly Powers, Benjamin Trott, and Mena G. Trott (2002),  Essential Blogging (Sebastopol, CA:  O’Reilly), or collections of articles and interviewsby and about bloggers, such as David Kline and Dan Burstein (2005),  Blog!  How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture (New York: CDS Books).

More serious attention has been given to blogs in relation to news and politics.  Dan Gillmor (2004) We the Media:  Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People (Sebastopol, CA:  O’Reilly) is a journalist’s series of anecdotes, but with very perceptive comments on the difference made by blogs and other ‘citizen journalism’ forms.  Stuart Allan (2006),  Online News: Journalism and the Internet (Maidenhead, UK:  Open University Press), which I just found, is a readable overview textbook (by the author of News Culture) that focuses on such cases as the reporting of 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina. Allan also has a chapter about on-line news in Mark J. Lacy and Peter Wilkin, eds. (2005), Global Politics in the Information Age (Manchester:  Manchester University Press).  There is an interesting theoretical chapter at the beginning of Michael Keren (2006) Blogosphere:  The New Political Arena (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books), about emancipation and narcissism.  After that the chapters are mostly descriptions of various blogs – an American soldier, an Israeli mother, Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan, who were early blogging celebrities.  They are bit disappointing, because the definition of ‘politics’ here is a rather narrow one:  Keren evaluates their writing about recognised political issues.