More dissertation progress

Ok, after a few days of being sick and unable to read or think, I managed to get some stuff done today.

First! I went to the OII library and got myself approved! I can take books out! Yay!

So then I came home and sat for hours on the internet looking up election stuff (Boo! Not productive!)

I sifted through the six journal articles that I'd downloaded on Saturday and decided that two of them, "Threaded Identity in Cyberspace: Weblogs & Positioning in the Dialogical Self" and "Virtually Speaking: Girls' Self-Disclosure on the WWW" look the most potentially useful, so I sent them to print.

I then went through all of the books I found through Google Scholar, cross-referenced them with the OII's holdings (ok, I just thought "cross-referenced" sounded fancy - really I just looked each of them up on SOLO), and got the shelf marks for my top three.

I also ordered a book from Amazon (dot com so my card didn't get charged international fees!).

(Update: just found a website where I could see some pages from the book and I canceled my order. Just didn't seem relevant enough to spend $20 on this early in the dissertation game).

I guess my next steps will be to try to figure out which blogs / online platforms to look at. I think that the Twitter-fying of Facebook makes it harder to use for this kind of thing; there's less of a stable idea of a profile than there was a couple of years ago.

What I'm really interested in as a person is the way that comment sections on various blogs work; i.e., you know that on Jezebel you're always going to get someone being really PC and accusing others of being offensive, no matter how much the original commenter tried to avoid that. So far the comment sections on XOJane have been very supportive, and I haven't really spent much time on Rookie, but since it's super trendy and up-and-coming, I'm really interested in it. Also, Tavi is basically who I wished I was back in the 90s - hip and edgy and quirky and confident and stylish.

I wonder if this format of blog, where there are several regular posters, a few recurring guest columns, and a regular core community of commenters would be worth studying.