Weblog as a personal thinking space

ABSTRACT

While weblogs have been conceptualised as personal thinking spaces since their early days, those uses have not been studied in detail. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a weblog can contribute to the process of developing ideas in a long-term complex project. To do so I use autoethnography to reconstruct my personal blogging practices in relation to developing PhD ideas from two perspectives. I first discuss my practices of using a weblog as a personal information management tool and then analyse its uses at different stages in the process of working on a PhD dissertation: dealing with fuzzy insights, sense-making and turning ideas into a dissertation text. The findings illustrate that next to supporting thinking in a way private notebooks do, a weblog might serve similar roles as papers on one's office desk: dealing with emerging insights and difficult to categorise ideas, while at the same time creating opportunities for accidental feedback and impressing those who drop by.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.0 General

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.8 PERSONAL COMPUTING
      K.8.0 General

General Terms:
Documentation, Human Factors, Theory

Keywords:
autoethnography, electronic notebooks, personal information management, weblogs, writing