Fieldwork is going really well, and after six months, we have many idea that we want to share with more people working in close areas, so with Alberto Corsin, I am co-organizing a workshop under the title: Prototyping cultures: social experimentation, do-it-yourself science and beta-knowledge. You can read the abstract below.
Prototypes have acquired certain prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Developers are here known for releasing beta or work-in-progress versions of their programmes, as an invitation or call for others to contribute their own developments and closures. An important feature of prototyping in this case is the incorporation of failure as a legitimate and very often empirical realisation.
Se celebró el primer encuentro estatal de ANT, y presenté una comunicación titulada: ‘Presente inscrito, esperanzas de revolución. Dinámica material de la esperanza en el bloguear apasionado’; parte del material en el que estoy trabajando actualmente. Hay una reseña del encuentro a cargo de Francisco Tirado, y más abajo el resumen de mi intervención.
I received the result of the review process of one article on e-research that I submit last year to a journal. It has been ten months since then. There is another paper going through a long and problematic review process that has lasted more than 18 months for now so the option is to publish the pre-print in advance but… this journals has not explicit politics on pre-prints so, it is time to start to ask for explicit politicis that allow publishing pre-prints in advance. I wrote on it last year on Mediacciones and I recover this post now. (re-published post) I have come across the issue of preprints in the last days after publishing some of my full and long abstracts in Mediacciones. By preprint I refer to “un-refereed author version of the article” (Oxford Journals) or “draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal (Wikipedia). I have been discussing with Anne Beaulieu whether it is a good practice to publish preprints and draft works on line. I am not sure which one is the best, however, I am inclined to publish any work in progress from the very beginning (as ideas, drafts, working papers, etc.).
This paper discusses the material dynamic of expectations among a collective of intensive bloggers in Spain and how they are enacted in the everyday blogging practice with the participation of the blog material infrastructure. I will argue that expectations on the power of blogs for transforming society are based in the massive material inscription of blog/blogger interactions. Empirical data has been produced during 18 months of fieldwork focused on the study of intensive bloggers, a collective defined by recognizing themselves as bloggers, blogging everyday, and being deeply involved in the construction of the Blogosphere in Spain. Empirical data has been obtained in three different contexts: the Internet, face to face events and bloggers meetings and interviews (online and face to face).
Last week I gave my first lecture titled Common values, controversial facts: Enacting dialogical ethics It was an honor for me to share part of the work that I have been doing on the topic of Internet Research Ethics in the 11th Annual Workshop of the Center for Qualitative Psychology. I spent two nice days in the island of Sardinia (Italy) where I met Vita Postuvan and Marja Kuzmanic, two Slovenjian researchers working on suicidiology (they make me think that there are fields in which ethical issues are really tough). I am convinced that there is still much work to do on this field although I had a conversation with Alberto the other day in which he questioned the very relevance of posing certain controversies and conflicts in the framework of ‘research ethic’.
New project, new city, new house and, the most exciting, new fieldwork. I have just started to work with Alberto Corsin in an ethnography focused on the study of… well, we are just defining the topic but it is oriented towards the analysis of new forms of innovation, new experimental practices based on digital technologies, the commons… all that happens around the Medialab, a singular Spanish centre located in Madrid that Marcos defines by drawing on its own name: “Medialab is a laboratory where people experiment”. Alberto is working in the Insititute of History, an institution located at the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Centre of the CSIC, so for now, I am working for the Institute of History. So this is it. I am getting my pants dirty again: back to fieldwork. Ah!, in brief I (and Alberto) will start to blog again (not from here, but from the new domain we will open). Stay tuned!.
I presented a seminar at Barcelona Media title ‘Internet dreams: ethical challenges researching digital technologies‘ (PDF) on februrary the 3th (2010). I have to thank Ricard Díez de Querol and Andreas Kaltenbrunner for inviting me. What I did was introduce some basis of research ethics and discuss the particular problems that the Internet poses for researchers, specifically how the dualism between private and public has shaped ethical decisions on Internet research for many times. However, this dualism is highly controversial, so I discussed two alternative approaches to guide the ‘what’ values (what values should we respect?) and the how (how should we respect them?). I really enjoyed the seminar as it raised many questions in the later debate. Read More »
¿Qué es la ética de la investigación en Internet?
Internet pone a un clic de distancia una enorme cantidad de información de individuos. El paraíso para un científico social que incluso podría plantearse realizar una investigación n intrusita. Sin embargo, inmediatamente se le plantean al investigador un buen número de cuestiones sobre la forma de proceder: ¿en qué condiciones es legítimo hacer uso de esa información?, ¿es necesario pedir permiso a sus autores?, ¿podemos hacer a las personas participantes de una investigación sin informarles previamente? Toda una serie de cuestiones que señalan el espacio de responsabilidad de un investigador y que genéricamente quedan incluidas en lo que se conoce como ética de la investigación. Read More »
En los últimos tiempos he estado trabajando en el tema de la ética en la investigación de Internet. Aquí van algunas referencias genéricas de guías éticas, y algunos artículos específicos que tratan la probelmática de la ética en de la investigación en el estudio de Internet.
El blog constituye una de mis principales ‘estrategias metodológicas’ en mi trabajo de campo sobre bloggers intensivos. En el diseño original de mi investigación el blog de campo tiene tres funciones iniciales, que las ha cumplido de largo: (i) ha sido un instrumento para la producción de rapport en el campo, (ii) ha sido una estrategia para indagar reflexivamente en la tecnología y para producir conocimiento sobre lo que signifcia ser blogger a partir de mi propia experiencia blogueando y (iii) ha servido para articular las decisiones éticas en el campo. Algunos de estos aspectos los discuto en un video que Francesc Balagué elaboró unos meses atrás.
El video elaborado por Francesc pertenece a una serie que ha preparado sobre el uso educativo de los blogs y que publica en su blog bloc de blocs; en ella también participan Ismael Peña, Tíscar Lara y José Luis Orihuela. Lo cierto es que es un asunto que necesita una reflexión tranvsersal. En mi tesis, un capítulo lo dedico específicamente a las implicaciones de esta estrategia en mi trabajo de campo. De hecho, para de mi reflexión la discutí en el artículo ‘Blogging as fieldwork’, que presenté en el seminario que Anne Beaulieu organizó con T.L. Taylor, In the game, en el congreso de la AoIR en el año 2008.
