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- Kjellberg, Sara
(författare)
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Forskarbloggar: Vetenskaplig kommunikation och kunskapsproduktion i bloggosfären.
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is the aim of this thesis to contribute to a research-based understanding of researchers’ use of blogs as a part of scholarly communication. The following research questions guide the investigation: (1) How are scholarly blogs constructed and used as sociotechnical systems in scholarly communication? (2) Which roles do scholarly blogs play in relation to other forms of scholarly communication? (3) Which expressions of researchers’ relations to the public emerge in scholarly blogs? Four separate research articles make up the main body of the thesis. These articles report on three largely independent studies which explore different aspects of scholarly blogs. The thesis starts from the assumption that scholar’s different epistemic cultures influence and shape scholarly communication practices. It furthermore approaches scholarly communication as practice. This makes it possible to include technology as shaping and being shaped by these practices. Consequently, scholarly blogs are treated as sociotechnical systems and envisioned as shaped in an interplay between technical and social aspects. The thesis’ first study takes a bird’s eye view and investigates the landscape of academic blogs. This is achieved through a case study of the Swedish academic blogosphere which unites a content analysis and a webometric analysis. The second study draws on 11 in-depth, semi- structured interviews with researchers who are all active bloggers. It focuses in particular on the motivations these researchers have for blogging, by starting from how they describe the functions that their blogs serve in their scholarly communication practices. Finally, the third study investigates characteristics of blogging as part of scholarly communication within epistemic cultures. This study is based on a genre-theoretical approach and structured around two groups of researchers in two disciplines, Physics and History. It employs a framework for situated genre-analysis, developed specifically for analysis of blogs, which is presented in a separate article in the thesis. The studies show that the motivations for maintaining scholarly blogs are as much of a personal character – i.e. blogs are used for fostering and supporting the researcher’s work – as driven by intentions to enter into a dialogue with others. Furthermore, scholarly blogs can be treated as a new genre situated in a researcher’s particular context. In addition, blogs maintained by researchers include several communicative purposes and target groups. Scholarly blogs show that the boundaries between the research community and society at large are far less distinct than has previously been suggested. Rather, scholarly blogs amalgamate formal and informal scholarly communication and, by mediating parts of otherwise informal interactions, scholarly blogs can contribute to a new kind of knowledge production.
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| 2. |
- Sköld, Olle, 1983-
(författare)
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Documenting Videogame Communities : A Study of Community Production of Information in Social-Media Environments and its Implications for Videogame Preservation
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Drawing on the disciplines of library and information studies and archival studies, this study seeks to explore the production of information in online videogame communities and to elucidate how such insights can offer practical and conceptual support to the knotty issue of how to preserve those sociocultural aspects of videogames that exist 'beyond' the code and audiovisual data resources of the videogame itself. This is accomplished in two principal moves: (i) by delving into the current state of socioculturally-focused videogame preservation and; (ii) by inquiring into the production of information carried out by videogame communities in what arguably is one of their most important interfaces of interaction—discussion forums, wikis, and other social-media services. The study is based on four papers (I–IV). Paper I develops the theoretical framework of the study on the basis of practice theory and document theory. Papers II and III report on field-studies of videogame-community information production in the context of two processes of importance in community social life: memory-making (II) and knowledge production (III). Paper IV offers a qualitative systematic review of videogame-archiving literature, allowing Papers I–III to be situated in an archival context. The study employs multiple methods and encompasses several empirical sites of inquiry and was inspired by the framework of exploratory research and of 'bricolage' research strategies.The results of the study add to the present state of knowledge on how information in the social-media environments of the large and influential present-day videogaming domain emerges as a result of community practices of production, and how videogame-community social life is entangled with information production in such spaces. The study also furthers archival inquiry on the topic of videogame preservation by providing a description and analysis of what information objects videogame-related social media plausibly hold, and by what communal practices and processes they have been brought into existence. Furthermore, the study examines the consequences of collecting community-produced social media and framing it as documentation of the sociocultural aspects of videogames—a key issue in videogames preservation.
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