Blending Blogging Into an Academic Text

Abstract

Although weblogs, as many other online tools, provide an opportunity to observe unobtrusively by lurking and reading, passive observation was not a choice for me: beginning of my PhD coincided with my first blogging experiences that eventually shaped the focus and methods of the research. Soon after starting my research on blogging practices of knowledge workers I found myself doing research through active participation (Mortensen, 2003). After submitting a paper with the first results I realised that my insights came as much from analysing replies to the questionnaire as from my experiences of being part of the community of knowledge management bloggers: writing Mathemagenic, my weblog, interacting with other bloggers and reflecting on those experiences. For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. At the moment of writing this I am working on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, where I blend blogging into an academic text, bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me. This paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it. I then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.