Wow. I’m slightly speechless/exhausted right now but I will try to create a coherent post! This week was basically full to the brim with thesis. There were a lot of little things to clean up, as well as a lot of expanding to be done. I’ll split my thoughts up into my scholarly essay experience and my infographic creations.
My scholarly essay took more time than I thought it would (surprise surprise). There were so many articles and books to be read. I felt really good getting to the source of a lot of ideas — I read a lot of Coleman, the “founder” of social capital in the U.S., Putnam who is the author of Bowling Alone, and a bunch of amazing case studies of social capital post-disaster as well as successful virtual communities. It was all really interesting, but to echo my title from last week, “research is not a well-oiled machine.” It took forever! In the end, it was fun synthesizing it all once I had all the sources down. Moving down the hourglass, I ended up tweaking my focus question, which made everything make much more sense! Instead of looking at the types of relationships being built, I changed it to types of interactions. It was too difficult and subjective to guess what the character of relationships was, but much more straight forward to quantify types of interactions. The section that needs the most attention in my next draft is my discussion. There were a bunch of topics I knew I should bring up as I was researching, but I think I need a small break from my thesis before I can get the perspective needed for my discussion.
The creation of the infographics was really fun! It was a really nice change of pace to work visually instead of with words, words words. I found the Cascadia infographic to be the most challenging to make, possibly because there is so much information on it. I also found that the information wasn’t that easy to find (I used the Oregon Resilience Plan in the end). Initially I envisioned them being part 1, 2, and 3 of a series of infographics, so each infographic kind of points to the next. While making them though, I got really design-excited and didn’t keep the themes consistent. I like that they can stand alone in this way, but I also think I might want some more continuity. I’ll be interested to hear what kind of feedback I get. I ended up using a book that the Interpersonal Media class uses – Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. The author, Howard Rheingold, has some good guidelines for how to interact in a virtual community (netiquette), and I added my own suggestions based off of my research as well.
Phewf! Time to sleep for a bit.