towards method(ology)
Social Network Theory and Small-world Networks
In order to develop a network theory that allows us to describe networked writers and to think about how writers behave in highly connected environments, my initial work will be to narrow my subject-pool from the dangerously nebulous (and highly innumerable) “mommy-bloggers” into a field more approachable. In order to do so, I will be borrowing from social net work theory its data collection tools, as well as the small-world network model as described by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees. Each of these systems provides me with vocabulary to position mom blogs in relation to one another, and allow me to ground my subject pool selection on substantial network models rather than random searches.
Social network theory assumes that “small scale interaction becomes translated into large scale patterns” (Granovetter 1360) [better thumbnail here, from someone other than Granovetter], and provides a framework for me to narrow the subject pool. Granovetter, sociologist at Stanford and author of “The Strength of Weak Ties,” posits that “strong [interpersonal] ties” can be measured by “a…combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and…reciprocal services” (1361). Further, “mutual choice” can also be an indicator of a “strong tie” (1364). Clearly, the nature of the blog as a computer-mediated communication tool allows writers to develop these strong ties as Granovetter describes them; however, in trying to compile a useable collection of texts to study, to begin the kind of close textual analysis necessary to, for instance, determine whether “mutual confiding” exists would be prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I plan to initially use only two of Granovetter’s strong tie gauges; this will preserve the integrity of the assembly by assuring those blogs that remain in the subject pool are indeed highly connected to one another. Additionally, it will allow me to save the actual content analysis (more on that later) for once I’ve settled on a collection of writers for the study.
The two components from social network theory I’ll apply in assembling the collection of blogs are “reciprocal services” and “mutual choices.” One function of blogs is that writers are able to, and often do, link in two directions. Writers can post outward links to other writers; that is, in a blog entry or on the main index (front page) of the site, the blogger can create a direct path to another blogger that readers can easily follow by “clicking through.” Most often these outbound links appear in a semi-static “blogroll” or list of bloggers the writer endorses or reads regularly. In addition, some blog applications afford the added dimension of “trackbacks” or incoming links, where a blogger can essentially post a link to her own blog on someone else’s site. Bloggers often do this when they want to respond (on their own site) to what another writer has posted, and the trackback provides a link to that response.
These linking practices provide a map for me to trace the ways in which bloggers self-select in connecting to one another. That is, bloggers sometimes will construct and maintain their blogrolls based on who is linking to them. In other words, a link can be seen as a gesture of appreciation: “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” At the same time, however, links also operate in a more conventional manner, where many bloggers link to the same popular writers, who often do not use blogrolls or post many outbound links. Through Technorati (technorati.com), a service that tracks the links between blogs, I can search for blogs that self-describe using tags like “motherhood” or “parenting” and then rank them based on their “authority” or number of incoming links.
Once I gather the list of most popular mom blogs, I’ll begin to work through them to find the highest ranking of the group that also publishes a weblog, and this blog will serve as the starting point for the compilation of my pool. I will not begin with the most-linked blog (the search consistently returns Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com) because it has no semi-static list of outbound links. Therefore, while dooce certainly exhibits a “mutual choice” that other bloggers make, Armstrong does not offer the “reciprocal services” in terms of linking back to her readers. I cannot begin with her blog and follow her links to describe a small-world network; beginning with dooce would not produce a network with a significant “clustering coefficient” (Watts 77). In other words, while Armstrong’s blog might be heavily connected, those connections are, for the most part, only running in one direction: towards her. Though dooce is a hub with over 5,000 other bloggers providing links in, it doesn’t provide those readers with ways of connecting with or between one another.
The blog with the most incoming links as well as a public blogroll is Her Bad Mother, written by a university instructor based in Toronto. From here, I’ll copy and paste the titles of those blogs into a word-processing document. Then, I’ll follow the first link on her blogroll, and copy and paste the titles from that blogroll into the same document. I’ll return to Her Bad Mother, and follow the second link, copying and pasting the blogroll from that blog into the same document. This will continue until I have compiled a list of all the blogs with outgoing links (once removed) from the most linked-to blog.
Once the list is complete, I’ll use a spreadsheet to organize (probably by alphabetical order), count, and select the blogs I’ll include in the pool. Those blogs that appear the most will [or there might be some great mathematical formula, where I calculate the total number of initial blogs (nor repeats) in proportion to the largest number of repeats to decided how many blogs I’ll actually end up with for the pool itself…]
Actor-Network-Theory, Content Analysis, and Map Analysis
Once the subject pool is collected, I’ll approach the blogs-as-texts by drawing heavily from Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT) as a driving theoretical methodology and by relying on content analysis for the systematic material coding of the blog posts. ANT requires that I approach my texts as performative traces of action—action which is the result of a network of people, objects, and ideas informing (or constitutes) a particular actor (here, a particular blogger); the blogger not only acts within the network but also as a product of the network (Latour 46). Further, ANT requires the researcher to allow the vocabulary of the actors be louder than that of the researcher; that is, “the concepts of the actors are allowed to be stronger than that of the analysts” (30).
[Must use content + map analysis so that I can not only characterize concepts but also trace their movement from one writer to another. Content analysis by itself does not specify movement or dynamism among or within the texts; it assumes texts are static and does not account for intertextuality...]