"Lee's Second (half-)Life" - 5 new articles

Not a good day today.

I feel like an academic fraud when sitting next to my peers at a thesis writing workshop.

I feel like I need to start my doctorate all over again, that my research question is naive and undergraduate in level. I feel like my data is unsubstantial and inadequate.

Not a good day, today.

    

Weick (1995, p.53), in his section on extracted cues, quotes Starbuck and Milliken (1988) on the different views of people located at different levels in a hierarchy:

People with expertise in newer tasks tend to appear at the bottoms of hierarchies and to interpret events in terms of these newer tasks and they welcome changes that will offer them promotion opportunities and bring their expertise to the fore. Conversely, people at the tops of organizational hierarchies tend to have expertise related to older and more stable tasks, and they favor strategies and personnel assignments that will keep these tasks central (p.53).

Weick, KE 1995, Sensemaking in organizations, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks

    

It appears that I am not the first researcher to consider joining SCT and Twitter; Bobby Rozzell (I’m guessing an undergraduate at the Elliott School of Communication, Wichita State University) joined the two in 2008.

“Wichita “Twitters” about the 2008 Presidential Election: Fantasy Theme Analysis of Messages During Three Election Night Time Phase” was a paper delivered by Rozzell to the 5th Annual GRASP Symposium, Wichita State University, in 2009.

In the paper Rozzell notes that he/she used Glaser’s (1965) Constant Comparative method of qualitative analysis. However, Rozzell doesn’t go on to explain why that particular analytic method was chosen and what other methods were originally considered and ultimately rejected in favour of Glaser’s method.

Rozzell took three distinct time periods as units of analysis; I wonder if Glaser’s method will support a different unit, that of a fortnight’s Twitter output. Because as Wu found (2011), traditional CAQDAS tools aren’t ready for Twitter:

We found it difficult to use currently available CAQDAS tools for such interactive analysis as they are all based on dealing with long files, but not one line messages.

Trying to fit one-line messages into Nvivo made no sense and Wu resorted to using Excel for analysis.

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Sources:

Glaser, B.G. 1965. The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis. Social Problems, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Spring, 1965), pp. 436-445

Rozzell, B.L. 2009. Wichita “Twitters” about the 2008 Presidential Election: Fantasy Theme Analysis of Messages During Three Election Night Time Phase. Proceedings of the 5th Annual GRASP Symposium, Wichita State University.

Wu, M. 2011. Symbolic Convergence Theory and Analysis of Online Discussion. Proceedings of QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN WEB 2.0
ASIA-PACIFIC, Macau, Feb 25.

    

DR MONICA RANKIN from the University of Texas at Dallas introduced Twitter into her history classroom a couple of years ago.

Here she talks about how successful the idea has been, even though, in her words, “it was going to get messy”.

Dr Monica Rankin: Twitter in the classroom

The lesson for business is clear: if staid organisations like academia can utilise this new technology and have success with it, why can’t your less-than-staid company?

Hat tip to Kim Flintoff for the video.

    

IT FEELS LIKE a lifetime ago that I was looking at and playing in Second Life.

But for those wondering if Second Life still exists, it does; signups are still happening, although Linden Lab haven’t published ‘active residents’ data for a couple of years now.

Here’s a chart of total signups, where you can see the number has reached over 25 million.

Thanks to Tateru Nino and Feldspar Epstein for maintaining these and other Second Life stats.