Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Keep a Diary, Study Diaries: The Personal and The Public in a Shifting Online World

About

Funny thing about change: sometimes it goes forward and sometimes it circles back. For a time, it seemed like email and user-created blogs were going extinct in favor of social media. Now those trends appear to be reversing. Corporatized social media is losing popularity while readers look for independent, authentic voices. Blogs, shared online diaries, have made a comeback. As one enthusiastic blogger observed, “creators, journalists, even politicians are leaving the scroll for the inbox.” Emerging platforms automate email delivery of blog posts to the inboxes of subscribers. A subscription, opt-in system means writers can go into more depth than is possible in the old-style tweet and focus on a niche with readers who share their interest. Writers and creators can make more flexible choices than allowed with social media posts in terms of length and use of visual materials and videos. This means rich, personal-meaningful source material for digital ethnographers. At the same time, researchers benefit from creating their own blogs to join online communities, share findings or work in progress, and network with other researchers. In this presentation we will explore the potential for collecting data from blogs, tips for keeping and using blogs as a research tool.

 

Speaker biography

Dr Janet Salmons is a free-range scholar. She edits the Substack newsletters, When the Field is Online and Reimagine Research. She is the author of 12 books aboutonline research and education and is currently working on a multimedia design guide for online researchers. She is a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany, and was in residence in 2024. She previously managed the Sage Publications research community, Methodspace. She served as a dissertation supervisor on the doctoral faculty of the Capella University School of Business from 1999-2016, and was honored with the Harold Abel Distinguished Faculty Award and the Steven Shank Recognition for Teaching for five consecutive years. She is an honorary member of the Textbook and Academic Authors Association Council of Fellows and received the Mike Keedy Award in recognition of enduring service to authors.

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