PhD Blog (dot) Net

It has been necessary in my PhD research to track my participants’ ‘off-radar’ social media activities. This is the term I use to describe any active contribution to sites that I am not routinely observing – such as commenting on a blog I am not following. My participants took on the responsibility of reporting such activities, and some found it useful to use Evernote.

Evernote is a private online annotation tool that enables the user to ‘grab’ specific content (such as a paragraph of text or an image) from web pages, and collect them on a personal site as ‘notes’ stored in folders called notebooks. Evernote also enables users to set up confidential links through its shared notebooks facility.

Not all my participants chose to use Evernote, preferring instead to keep a log or simply e-mail updates. But those that did generally found it a quick and unobtrusive method of self-reporting, and one participant adopted it into her everyday practice.

Here’s a guide for researchers who may want to use it in this way:

Set up

The researcher and each of the participants will need to first sign up at http://www.evernote.com/

Click the Create Account button, complete the Register for Evernote panel and follow instructions. Evernote is free for a monthly upload allowance of 60mb.

Create a Notebook

Each participant will need to set up a notebook for all the content they specifically want to share with the researcher.

In the Notebooks panel (top left), select New Notebook and give it a name
(They can set up as many notebooks as they want for other purposes if they wish.)

To save files

The easiest way for participants to save content to Evernote is using the Web Clipper tool. This is a simple ‘bookmarklet’ that adds a button to the browser toolbar (Evernote supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome). To set this up, they need to go to:

http://www.evernote.com/about/download/web_clipper.php

Once this is set up, participants can simply highlight any content on a web page and click the Evernote button. They do not need to have their Evernote site open at the time, but the next time they view it they will see the content has been added as a note.

To share Evernote notes

This is the set up procedure for participants to allow the researcher to access the notes they wish to share. They will only need to do this once:

In the Share drop down menu (top right), click on Share Notebooks…
In the Notebook Sharing panel, click the Start Sharing button next to the notebook to be used for the research
In the Share with individuals panel, select Invite individuals to access this notebook
In the Email invitations to box, type in the researcher’s e-mail
Under the heading Recipients may:, select View this notebook
Keep the Require log in to Evernote box ticked
Click the Send invitations button

Some alternatives to Evernote can be found here.

This blog, my wiki (both public) and my research journal (private) represent the primary tools I use to record my academic progress and Doctoral experience. Each can be seen as serving specific and interrelated processes of documentation, reflection and dissemination. Such things are rarely reflected on, so there’s nothing like a damp bank holiday weekend to do so…

I’ve discussed various aspects of my blogging previously here. Suffice to say, i see this blog as the focal point of my web activity. Even though I’m frequently more active in using Twitter, Delicious, Mendeley and other tools, this is at the heart of my engagement with the wider academic community and the first place I direct anyone interested in my work.

I use Google Sites for my wiki. It’s a wiki tool in all but name, and one I find to be more effective and reliable than others I’ve tried (such as Wetpaint). I feel I’m yet to develop the full potential of the wiki. It remains a largely static repository whilst it could integrate much more dynamic cross referencing and annotation to facilitate thesis development. Perhaps this will be realised once I reach the writing-up stage of my PhD. I have no problems sharing my work in progress – I think it’s a personal choice. As my PhD is fundamentally rooted in participatory practices and openness in academic work, I guess it helps to practice what I preach. I don’t think many people actually read the wiki, but occasionally it’s useful to reference parts of it on my blog, which is a more appropriate platform for gaining feedback.

My research journal is an old-fashioned diary-style Excel file which I use to collate random thoughts and ideas, quotations and references, and notes on seminars I have attended etc. – much of it actually on the periphery of my PhD. Some content may become formalised into blog posts, wiki entries and thesis drafts. Maybe I should use a private wiki-type site for this, to enable access from any computer and facilitate better search and cross referencing.

These tools are interconnected in various ways to other tools and services which I use both on and off-line, particularly my Twitter and Delicious sites. I’ve also started using Evernote again, primarily to keep tabs on comments I make on other people’s blogs and in social network sites and fora. (I’m considering this or some similar web-based ‘sticky notes’ system for my participants in my main study). Some call this combination of tools a Personal Learning Environment/Network (PLE/N) – ambiguous and contested terms I’m happy to let others use. Key for me is identifying how and why we adopt and configure these tools, and how they transform and disrupt our academic practices. It’s always worth reflecting on your own use of technologies when investigating others.

Having recently created the 1000th bookmark on my Delicious site, it’s as good a time as any to pause and reflect on social bookmarking.

I think Delicious itself is one of the most smartly realised websites out there. Its pared-down 2008 redesign – with its two-colour, modular interface – perfectly suits my design sensibilities. Not only is this one of my most important social media resources, but is one that has significantly changed the way I think about collecting Web-based content. I can confidently and routinely save and forget about the resources I tag, yet easily find them again when required (evidence that tools can and do shape practice). Any ‘intra-personal’ tagging inconsistencies are quickly resolved by occasional housekeeping.

Folksonomies would seem to represent a radical democratisation in the ordering, managing and sharing of digital content. Yet part of my role as a critical researcher is to challenge the rhetoric that routinely surrounds Web 2.0 technologies, and in considering social bookmarking, two issues in particular spring to mind:

Just how social is social bookmarking?

I’m fully aware of the social and collaborative affordances of social bookmarking sites like Delicious, yet I consider my own resource as predominantly a personal rather than social bookmarking site. Clearly there are specific strategies and methods that can be adopted to utilise participatory features such as networks and subscriptions, yet I’ve never been motivated to apply them regularly. Is this use of Delicious typical, or am I oblivious to widespread social and collaborative practices across bookmarking sites?

Replication

I also wonder how distinctive folksonomies represented by the collective tagging of a platform like Delicious actually are. When I’ve occasionally used Delicious as a social search engine, results have been interesting, yet I’ve not been inspired to adopt this activity regularly. If the majority of users are saving Web resources based on Google searches and social networking interactions, does social bookmarking merely replicate existing and more dominant systems? I’d be interested in any thoughts on this.

I’ve had it with EndNote. I’ve transferred all my references to Zotero and plan to use it as my main bibliographic organiser. Zotero operates on the Firefox browser and seems light and versatile in comparison, particularly in referencing Web-based content – I was never convinced with EndNote Web. Developed at George Mason University, Zotero seems to be gaining recognition and support across the academic world, and successfully survived a threatened lawsuit with Thomson Scientific. I never got the hang of Endnote’s Cite-While-You-Write, but apparently, Zotero has a similar feature which I need to try out as, at present, I am creating my references manually.

…is the record for the longest time it’s ever taken me to install a piece of software (NVivo 8):

• Downloading NVivo Installation File (30 minutes)
• Attempting to install NVivo and finding out what the problem was (1 hour)
• Downloading and installing Windows Service Pack 1 (4 hours)
• Downloading and installing Windows Service Pack 2 (3 hours)
• Installing Microsoft SQL and Crystal Reports (90 minutes)
• Entering cracked code (1 minute)

Hope it’s worth it.

After testing a few open source and Web app. alternatives, I have opted for Google Sites to develop a PhD wiki. I hope this will prove to be a useful prersonal resource – particularly for developing sophisticated cross referencing between entries – whilst also enabling the dissemination of a wide range of formal and informal texts. I’ve added a handy link at the top of the sidebar.

Just launched in beta, refseek is a search engine for students and researchers. It seems a handy academic filter, and may be a useful alternative to the science bias of Google Scholar.