My paper on CMC and conversation analysis has been approved and I have published it on my blog (at the bottom of the side list under “My Papers”).

Other entries about this:
CMC & conversation analysis
Conversation analysis and CMC

Through Daniel Boud’s Web Pedagogy Blog I found this article with a list of tips for bloggers: 47 key tips from the World’s best BLOGGERS . Here a number of experienced bloggers have listed suggestions for how to succeed as a blogger. Many of these are valuable to me as a newbe. I especially like the following tip from J Adrian Hon: “The ìsecretî is to understand that youíre the person who decides whether your Weblog is a success, not anyone else.” Another of the tips I’m not so sure about. J Jason suggests: “Use correct grammar, no misspellings, and make sure all punctuation is in the right place.” Is this really true? Would it be so extremely annoying to read a blog filled with misspellings and strange punctuation that you couldn’t continue reading it? In another entry Daniel lists a number of online resources on academic blogs. Interesting reading.

Tomorrow Bryan Alexander from Middlebury College in Vermont who’s visiting HUMlab and Ume at the moment will give a seminar entitled “Cyberculture, literature and the textual imagination“. I’m sure it will be very interesting! If you don’t have the possibility to come here to Ume in person you can watch it live over the internet and interact with Bryan through a text chat. It begins at 3.10pm. Be there!

This morning I found a number of commercial comments in my blog (from the same address). Does anyone know of a way to block such unwanted comments? Or a quick way to delete them without having to enter each message before being able to delete the comment in question?

The other day I had a conversation with my 19-year old sister and her friend about my thesis. They both use text messaging a lot and had some thoughts about the use of smileys. Even though they claimed that it sometimes felt geeky to use smileys in their messages they have become so used to it that they can feel the need to put a smiley into formal text to clarify what is meant by an utterance. This is not very surprising – during my teacher’s practice I have in fact come across essays written by high school students that have had smileys in them. I am sure that most people know that the variety used in text messaging (short utterances, abbreviations, smileys etc.) shouldn’t be used in formal text, but for people used to text messaging it takes some practice to learn how to show for instance irony in writing without using smileys. The girls didn’t seem too worried, but they told me that their parents sometimes did. After having sent a text message they would occasionally receive a phone call from a worried parent reminding them how to spell certain words that were “misspelt” (read: abbreviated) in the message.

I am in the process of trying to find interesting blogs that deal with similar topics as mine. There are quite a few of them out there, which is great! I started out by searching on a couple of different blog directories, which turned out to be quite difficult. In some cases there seems to be no control of whether the blogs really deal with what they claim to deal with (this is probably nothing new to the experienced blogger). For me it was much more rewarding to follow the links from good and interesting blogs directing me to others. First of all I have to give credit to Stephanie Nilsson, who has introduced me to blogging, and whose links have been of great help. Other interesting blogs with good links are Jill Walker’s blog and Lisbeth Klastrup’s Cataclysms. (By the way: Both of them have visited HUMlab and given seminars, which are available as RealPlayer streams: Jill Walker: Blogging: hvordan nettskriverier pvirker s¯kemotorer og kjÊrlighetsliv; Lisbeth Klastrup: En poetik for virtuelle verdener.) I hope to find time (perhaps rather to learn to prioritize) to read more in (and comment more on) other people’s blogs; an important idea behind the whole blogging concept. I have to admit that it also would be nice to be able to extend my own “Blogs I read” list.

To get credits for the summer school on ICT and the Humanities that I visited in the beginning of the summer I have to write a paper dealing with literature and ICT in some way. I have come up with a few ideas for topics, but they are huge and probably more like dissertation topics than topics for a small paper. Here are some of them:
- Identity and self-representation in the virtual world
- Computer games as a new literay genre? (about the dispute between the narratologists and the ludologists)
- Literary hypertexts and the role of the hyperlink
- The ‘visual turn’
I have a meeting with my supervisor this afternoon, and hopefully he can help me develop an idea for a doable paper.

Any suggestions from my great crowd of readers?

(Previous entries about the summer school: ‘Summer School’)

Yes! I have now finished my paper on CMC and conversation analysis, which I was writing for my Conversation Analysis course. As soon as my supervisor has approved I will post it here on my blog. While waiting you can read some of my reflections in the continued part of this posting.
(Oh there is more…)

So, here is the link to the seminar stream I wrote about in my last entry:

Lena Karlsson: Diary Writing on the Web: Consuming Lives, Creating Community

You will need RealPlayer to be able to watch it.

Yesterday I attended a seminar in HUMlab on the expression of ethnicity in blogs. The speaker was Lena Karlsson from Lund University who has investigated a cluster of web journals written by women of Asian decent living in the States. She discussed both ethnicity and the effects of the new medium on the journal writing. Very interesting! (The seminar was filmed and streamed. I’ll direct you to the stream as soon as it’s made available.)

One of my colleagues in HUMlab, Stephanie Nilsson, also conducts research on blogging but from a linguistics perspective. She has recently published her masters thesis on “Blogspeak”. Check her blog out!