Blogs

Ken Smith is collecting bloggers who do and who do not maintain eye contact on their blogs. I am listed as an eye-contact blogger, as is Jill. Michael Bérubé does not make eye contact.

Now I want to join in: Liz, Scott, Tracy, Lessig, Siva, Logie, and Becky make eye contact, as does Amy (I took that picture!); Jason Nolan, Ron Silliman, Jason Shim, and Mike do not. I guess that last one is debatable, but I don't feel that the eye contact is direct. This phenomenon is not particularly important, of course, but fun to observe nonetheless.

Many of you have followed my recent adventures in tenancy, so in the interest of following up, I'll report that I have put a deposit down on a new apartment: a studio in a blissfully un-trendy industrial park neighborhood. This will be the third time in 12 months that I've moved; the last time, after the roof caved in, was in -4 degree weather, on ice. After living in two trendy neighborhoods, I've found that the landlords there can charge far too much for rundown slums, and treat you poorly on top of it all. I was going to move into a new apartment in my current, post-roof-cavein building (my roommate is getting married), but I was hesitant, as our sleazy landlord has entered our apartment unannounced just as I was getting out of the shower, causing me to panic because I realized someone was in the house, plus he smokes in our apartment. Do you want to elicit pure rage in me? Smoke in my apartment. But I looked at an apartment in this building anyway; there is something to be said for hauling your stuff down the stairs and not having to bother with renting a van. I'll call the apartment the fallout shelter. It was in the basement, it stank of smoke and cat urine, and there was one small window level with the ground, which any shady person could kick in and shimmy into, not to mention that the lack of light would have made me quite depressed.

Then I looked at an apartment in the un-trendy neigborhood (said studio), which has a whole wall of windows, new appliances including a dishwasher and microwave, tons of storage space so that my living area can be nice and sparse, and the lease-incentive option of two accent walls, to be painted before I move in on 1 June, in my choice of about 10 colors. I have already chosen red (my color exactly) and "expressive plum." I think I'll have the red wall in the main room and the plum wall in the bathroom. I hope this is the last apartment I'll have in Minnesota.

Elijah has posted the two papers he co-authored for Into the Blogosphere:

Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright, "Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs"

Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah Wright, "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs"

I encourage you to check them out and draft responses if you like. The collection will run on Movable Type, so you'll be able to post the responses directly under the essays.

In a recent post with many thoughtful comments following, Jill ponders the ethics of having students write blog reviews after one person whose blog was being reviewed protested to the assignment. Ethics in blog research is an issue we need to talk about, and I've been learning from Lilia's thoughts and Alex's as well. Jill says,

In time, I hope that the general public becomes more aware of that to publish something on the internet means to publish it, and that unless it's password protected it can and will be read by anyone.



What do you think?

I'm in agreement with most of the people in the thread and with Jill--when you blog, you are publishing. The Association of Internet Researchers has this huge PDF tome on the ethical issues in internet research, and one is perceived privacy. From the tome:

What are the initial ethical expectations/assumptions of the authors/subjects being studied?


For example: Do participants in this environment assume/believe that their communication is private? If so – and if this assumption is warranted – then there may be a greater obligation on the part of the researcher to protect individual privacy in the ways outlined in human subjects research (i.e., protection of confidentiality, exercise of informed consent,
assurance of anonymity - or at least pseudonymity - in any publication of the research, etc.).
If not – e.g., if the research focuses on

publicly accessible archives;

inter/actions intended by their authors/agents as public, performative

(e.g., intended as a public act or performance that invites recognition
for accomplishment), etc.;

venues assigned the equivalent of a “public notice” that participants and their communications may be monitored for research purposes;


….
then there may be less obligation to protect individual privacy.

A big question in internet research is: Are we studying texts, or are we studying people? The answer makes all the difference. Perhaps there's the rub--articulating a rationale for why studying weblogs is studying texts, not people. For my part, I know my blog is reviewed or discussed in some way in at least two classes. It doesn't bother me at all; they can say whatever they want. They are studying text, as far as I'm concerned, but then again I don't blog about my personal life very much. If I were studying a blog like Jasper's, I'd definitely see it differently and would feel unethical if I didn't have informed consent.



Addendum: When starting my first project on gender and blogging, I had to get IRB approval (a.k.a. Human Subjects Review). They did not see what I was doing as studying texts at all. I understand to some extent; I was doing a survey, after all. But what is most interesting to me is that, when I explained that I was giving a survey to the members of Blog Sisters and that I might quote material posted to the site, they required me to get a letter of consent from the site administrators of Blog Sisters. They said that a web site is no different from a physical site to them (for example, if someone wanted to do research in a writing center or in a museum, they'd have to get that research site consent letter.). It strikes me as strange, but I'd like to see what others think.

I've been meaning to post my approved rhetorical theory reading list. As you can see, I'm skewing it more in the direction of the modern era:

I finished another one a few minutes ago. They're easy to make now that I've gotten the hang of knitting on double-pointed needles:

Here's the finished product:



These umbilical cord hats have been a big hit with my friends who are mothers, but now I'm ready to move on to an adult hat. For myself. Made from some gorgeous crimson merino wool yarn I scored on clearance.

Amanda says that everyone has linked to this story in the Chronicle about Invisible Adjunct. I'm embarrassed to be so slow on the uptake, but thought I would comment on it since I recently posted a paper I wrote about the Chronicle and IA.

The article is nice, quite an encomium. It's written by Scott Smallwood, the same staff writer who interviewed Jill Carroll in an article titled, "Less Whining, More Teaching: Jill Carroll, a Proud Part-Timer, Thinks Many Adjuncts Need a New Attitude." (Subscribers only.) Of course I know that Smallwood shouldn't be held accountable for writing a rather celebratory piece on adjuncts' embracing capitalism and entrepreneurship, as the one on Carroll is. (Interestingly enough, he quotes IA's response to that article: "'For all practical intents and purposes, the adjunct is a low-wage worker without benefits who can be hired and fired at will,' she once wrote. 'So in what way can the adjunct be an entrepreneur, except in his or her own mind?'" but doesn't provide the context.) He's writing for a specific publication with specific generic conventions that, I still argue, uphold the status quo. True, he characterizes the hiring system as "broken," but it remains the case that most of the Chronicle's inculcations about academic labor are jeremiads, not radical critiques such as IA's weblog.