For quite a while I’ve been on a conference abstinence track – not submitting papers and limiting attendance in order not to get distracted from the PhD writing.
That’s said, I’m extremely happy writing a paper and going to Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen. It was intense (especially given that I didn’t finish a PhD chapter before leaving) and insightful – it feels that I had all the conversations put on hold over last year in four days… And, the best thing of that came out of it is – somehow having all those conversations really helped me to feel that “I’m there” PhD-wise. Of course, there is still lots of writing to be done, but that feels more like working out all the loose ends and making threads that go through different pieces more visible and more strong. The conference was also good to start thinking about the post-PhD life – reflecting on what topics and people I was drawn to helps to get a feeling of where I’ll be heading next.
I hope to be able to write on some of the themes in more detail, so just the highlights to remember what to write about (I may also come back and edit this post with more ideas and links):
- a distinction between friendship-based and interest-based participation and learning in a keynote by Mimi Ito (notes by Axel Bruns), loosely corresponding to maintaining existing connections and creating new ones
- thinking about online places – their differences from physical places and co-presence as a way of constructing them – and ways of studying (in) them
- communities, online places and participation; multiple places + multi-membership
- experienced as an individual and implications for research and practice
- learning: community-based, (duad) relation-based, artefact-based?
- different ways to look at privacy: episodes, aggregations over time, patterns, lifestreaming triangulations
- blogs
- blogs as transitional objects (find the paper!)
- exploring identity and constructing identity in one space; changes over time
- crafts online and research on mommy-blogging (loved to see research done on things I am exposed to via non-work blog reading)
- researching fast changing fields – audiences and expectations (later:
Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations)
Twitter notes from two ‘communities’ session on the last day are here.