The Language of Blogs

Blogging linguists II

Back in August 2006, I listed some blogs by linguists.  Most of them are still going in 2009, and they are kept up rather better than my blog.  I asked then whether PhD students who blogged this well would ever find time to finish their dissertations, so I am happy to see that the author of the excellent Tenser, said the Tensor has. 

A couple posts ago, I got a comment from Carole at Bloglingua, which made me think I need to update that list.  Bloglingua is from a translation services company, so they are linguists in the more popular sense of the word:  they know languages and use them professionally. From the Bloglingua blogroll, I found Transubstantiation and Blogos, which are also about translation, and are also regularly updated with lively language stories.

When I made my first list, I somehow missed Separated by a Common Language, by Lynne Murphy at the University of Sussex, perhaps because her blog was new then. And as her title suggests, she has a specific focus:

So, when you heard about a blog on British and American English, did you think: 'There's a blogger who's going to run out of material soon'? If only! I've written more than 300 posts on BrE and AmE over the past three-and-a-bit years, have 92 messages in my inbox requesting discussion of other (often MANY other) topics that I've not yet covered . . .

I come across (or produce) lots of examples of UK/US differences. Here's one:  when I say in my northwest US accent that my wife is going to her writing group, British people think it will be something to do with horses - unless they know my wife.  Like anyone from the US living in the UK (or presumably the other way around), I have a store of these examples, but I have never treated them with Murphy's thoroughness and skill, even when I briefly taught a course on the subject.  And she performs the service of listing both US and UK commentators on language, in lists that overlap with mine a bit. 

There is another list that is still updated at The Linguist List, but it is rather a mixed bag.

Blogging has moved on since 2006.  I didn't think I would find any linguistic Twitterers, but 40 people do find useful things to say at Linguistics Twibe.   Well, there are mostly queries and announcements;  apparently it does take more than 140 characters to say something about linguistics (I usually find the 8,000 words of a journal article rather restricting). 

There is a wonderful Twitter project linked to a study by my colleague Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall of Manchester Met:  it sends the message found on an Edwardian postcard every day. I've subscribed  because it seems like an excellent way to think about the similarities and differences between the two media for short texts, postcards and Twitter.  Julia and Cath Booth have even figured out a way to include the pictures.

web

Parked near St. Just, Cornwall

To Blog: A Transitive Verb?

It is unusual to use the verb 'to write' (or its French equivalent) as an intransitive, so unusual that Roland Barthes was being provocative and witty when he titled an essay, 'To Write:  An Intransitive Verb?' One writes something, a book or a letter or a poem. In contrast, the verb 'to blog' seems to be more often intransitive (I haven't actually done a corpus study). One can blog from somewhere (a fair or convention) or about something (politics or football), but one doesn't blog something, one just blogs, as an activity in itself.

When one does blog something, the implication is often that one is doing something different from most blogs, committing oneself to a finite project with a single focus. Julie Powell's The Julie/Julia Project, on which Nora Ephron's current movie is based, is probably the best-known example in the moment – all 536 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.  One of my favourite blogs, 101 Cookbooks, apparently started in a similar way, as Heidi Swanson's attempt to explore the cookbooks she already had before buying any more - though she continued after she finished with her shelf of books.

In most of the examples of blogging something that I have come across, that something is a complex text.  But to say one is blogging that text, one is saying more than that it is one's subject matter;  one is implying that it will be transformed by the form of the blog, a personal response given in short date-stamped messages rather than an essay or a book.  If one blogs about the Bible, one could comment on anything and everything to do with the Bible, but if one says one is Blogging the Bible,  as David Plotz set himself to do in Slate, one is apparently committed to reading it (or rather, the part Christians refer to as The Old Testament) through from beginning to end and writing something about every book.  Plotz's project is different from the thousands of Biblical commentaries over two millennia, not only because he does not present himself as an expert or authority, but also because his responses unfold in real time.  He doesn't promise us an overall reading of the whole text;  he will just give us the experience, week by week.

I tried to see if there were other, similar projects out there by Googling 'Blogging the'.  That turned up several projects modelled on Plotz's, such as Ziauddin Sardar's Blogging the Qur'an.  Churches around the world have a go at Blogging the Psalms, but I find most are doing something rather different from Plotz, a series of more traditional meditations or reflections than a project moving through the Book of Psalms over time.  The Talmud Blog  is promising, because some might argue that the Talmud itself, with its commentaries on commentaries, has something blog-like, but blog is a noun rather than a verb here, and it turns out to be about 'Talmudic News, Reviews, Culture, Currents and Criticism', not a project of reading the text.  For readers in search of more secular meditation, there is John Whitfield's Blogging the Origin , in which a science writer tries to convey some of the experience of grappling with a classic but often unread text.  I'm a bit surprised that I can't find a blog in which someone works their way through Marx's Capital, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or Joyce's Ulysses;  perhaps people feel they would be too vulnerable, exposing their naïve reading of such heavily annotated texts, or setting themselves us for a blog that stops awkwardly on page 82.

Perhaps the best example of blogging as a transitive verb, and the example that started me on this search, is Steve Coll's Blogging the Stimulus in the online version of The New Yorker (and once again I owe the tip to the podcast of On the Media).  Coll says he planned to do what journalists always do, skimming through the bill designed to boost the US economy after the financial crisis, looking for nuggets that might be the basis for an article.  But inspired by Plotz's Blogging the Bible , he made a project of reading every one of the 407 pages, taking 21 posts over five months to bring out many different aspects of the complex legislation. Though most would probably agree that the Stimulus Bill is rather less inspiring than the Bible, the blog is a wonderful exercise leading to many insights, with an appetite for detail worthy of I.F. Stone.

But in some ways, projects like Powell's, Plotz's and Coll's are atypical of blogging.Most blogs go outward, in all directions, taking in a range of links;  that is why they are best thought of in intransitive terms, as an activity having no particular object. Plotz and Coll stick to their one furrow. And their projects, by their nature, are finite; they are like HBO miniseries vs. the soap operas of most continuing blogs. It is perhaps relevant that both Plotz and Coll are professional journalists (as is Whitfield), writing for established media outlets, not novices sharing their ignorance with the world;  they are in some ways writing books in instalments (and indeed Plotz's text has come out as a book).  So it is probably fairer to say that they have used the blog genre to do something it is not usually used to do, but is certainly worth doing. I am on the lookout for more such projects. Google says there is no 'Blogging the Munros', by one of those people who makes a project of the 284 peaks in Scotland that are over 3000 feet tall. I would take it on, but I suppose that the title would imply one was going to climb them, not just write a post about each of them.

 

 

Censoring Wikipedia?

Once again, the WNYC podcast of On the Media alerted me to a media story that was getting more attention in the US than in the UK:  the revelation that Wikipedia had gone along with the blackout on news about the kidnapping of the New York Times reporter David Rohde. Apparently the Times asked Jimmy Wales to intervene personally.  So I took a look at the 'Talk' page on his Wikipedia entry.  That page has about two hours of discussion, before the topic was archived, and redirected to the policy discussion pages, 'The Village Pump'. 

Now I don't know if it was, in fact, necessary to keep news of Rohde's kidnapping out of the media, for his safety.  And I don't have the day-to-day editorial expertise to day whether Wikipedia needs regular procedures for dealing with this sort of situation (as suggested by some at 'The Village Pump') or whether such a case can only be handled on an ad hoc basis. 

What strikes me reading over the arguments, both the first hot reactions and the later more thoughtful and extensive discussion, is that this debate is different from many other running controversies at Wikipedia.  In my book, I discuss controversies around the article '7 World Trade Center', which turned mainly on issues of which facts were relevant, which sources established these facts, and how they were to be interpreted.  In other controversial articles, for instance 'Vaccination', there is much invocation of Wikipedia Principles.  Here there seems to be a difference between those who see this as a case in which two principles conflict (openness of information vs. protection of a life) and those who see it as a matter of a single absolute principle.

Here is the one mention of earlier attempts to include the information:

Who the hell is removing the bit about him being kidnapped? It's confirmed by several sources and even if it's not on the news, doesn't make it a false statment, someone should really look into this. 218.188.3.124 (talk) 02:32, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

After the news was out, we get exchanges like this:

Be smart don't add kidnapping information that would raise the value of the target to kidnappers. Thanks to wikipedia for doing the right thing. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 03:46, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, because suppressing information is what the internet is for...... 192.136.16.3 (talk) 13:53, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Some more early comments (edited):

    Wikipedia hits bottom; keeps digging

What happened is just ridiculous. A man's life doesn't justify censorship of informations on Wikipedia. What are good reasons for censorship? The ones that Jimmy Wales chooses? What if someone who has 'power' decides that something must not be published, for his alleged "good reasons". A life perhaps has been saved (are we sure that it was because of the media blackout?), but Wikipedia's neutrality and freedom has been seriously undermined. Not counting the fact that the New York Times editor, with only several phone calls, succeeded in making all the other media not to publish the news...

The suppression of relevant facts to please powerful outside interests proves that this leftist propaganda site is just that. 

I am appalled that Wikipedia would violate its published principles to prevent publishing the truth. It will be the beginning of the end.

These statements  are made with the assumption that others will recognise and agree with the principle at issue.  What is that principle?  That all statements that are true should be published?  That all censorship is wrong?  Or is it a matter of equality:  everyone has the right to post on Wikipedia, and no one person has the right to remove it?  There is certainly a enormous resentment of both Jimmy Wales and the Times. I can understand the resentment of Wales;  Wikipedia is based on the work of many people, and his tendency to intervene in some cases is anomalous.  I have never understood the anger in the blogosphere directed at the Times.  

At least the discussion led me on to a page on the 'Argumentum ad Jimbonem', which is 'the logical fallacy that "what Jimbo said" is The Truth™' ('Jimbo' here being Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia).

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.