Thesis Whisperer and I have been researching for a paper we are giving at a forthcoming conference. it’s about academic blogging and you can read our initial abstract here.
We divided the researching task into two and Inger ‘found’ and analysed blogs while I scanned, mapped and focused in on literatures. This process went well and we met our deadline of finishing this part of the work by end November.
Because we live in different parts of the world we also had to sort out how to produce the actual paper.
We decided that what we needed to do was to start with a kind of extended abstract that summarised what we had to say. We chose to do this on powerpoint. Inger started off with a slide show on googledocs and invited me into her file. She produced a title slide and slides about the substantive findings. I then added an introduction, slides about some of the literatures, and a tentative concluding slide. This was pretty efficient and I can recommend it as a strategy for getting a paper sorted quickly and effectively.
Next we had a discussion on Skype and through this, we added more details to the argument and to the so-what conclusion.
You can see what we did here – Academic blogging practices?
As you will observe, we now have a set of slides we can use at the conference and – very important – a pretty coherent step-by-step guide to writing the actual paper.
We also changed our mind about our argument in the light of our more extended data analysis and the literatures. We think that these might surprise a few people – what do you reckon?
patter 
Thanks for sharing this! Two comments:
– I really like the idea of using Powerpoint for collaborative work, especially when it is long-distance! I often find that Powerpoint is a great thinking tool when I work alone too.
– The draft presentation looks interesting, but also raises some red flags for me. I greatly value mixing qualitative and quantitative methods (http://wp.me/p2dcew-3M) but I am wary of half-way approaches that are neither one nor the other. All the percentages in your Powerpoint made me nervous, given how little you say about how you selected the blogs. The percentages can be valuable, but only if you attribute more authority to the sample. The size (173) is not bad, and it would not make much sense to aim for a random sample of blogs. What would be very good to see, however, is specifics that attribute more authority to this particular sample of blogs. Perhaps there is a smart move behind the somewhat vague reference to ‘modified snowball technique’? If so, do bring it out and make us respect this slice of the blogosphere as well-chosen before breaking it down by per cent. In addition to the statistics, I look forward to seeing more in-depth analyses in later versions of the paper!
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Ill refer this to Inger but I think she probably has explained some of this already in a previous post.
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Reblogged this on flights of fancy.
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I saw this today: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/whats-new-in-digital-scholarship-twitter-philosophies-dying-on-facebook-and-the-age-of-mobile-media/
I suppose it’s been circulated on Twitter and on all the main social media…
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