As we approach the portion of class dedicated to internet research, I must admit that I have been most excited about this portion of the syllabus. Since most of my past research has dealt with virtual worlds, specifically video games, I have been curious as to how new methods are developed specifically to study identity in video gaming contexts.

Lee's book was too elusive for me to get a good read in. I'll not waste time fabricating my understanding of the work to post a blog. I will try to replicate my earlier post regarding the seminar paper topic:

I'm glad I spent so much time detailing my paper. I wonder if angel's can read blog posts that disappear into the ether.

So far we’ve been equipped with several ways to think about method. The past few weeks on unobtrusive methods have seemed to zero in on method as an evaluative toolset. Here we get novel considerations of how to address validity, reactivity, and sampling while using observation, archival work, and to some degree, experimentation. At a much greater level of abstraction, we get method as epistemology. These are the philosophical questions raised by Smith and Heshusius that provide deeper justification for the measurement tools we employ.

After reading Lee's book, what I find especially interesting, which may be highly relative to my research method project, is a section in chapter 3 on still photography and method in visual sociology and the analytic strategies in chapter 4, in particular on grounded theory and semiotic analysis.

Like others, I felt the need to change the approach I took to last week's blog question. While it still centers on issues of technology and human interaction, it focuses more on how people react to virtual social situations through their bodily responses, and how the person chooses to perform an identity through the use of computer mediated communication. Specifically, this study would focus on how a person selects aspects of their emotional state and embodied experience and relates it to other people through an online game.

I decided to do a completely different method post than the
one I wrote about last week.  Coming up
with an unobtrusive method to my own research is somewhat difficult.  I respect J.H.Snider's use of unobtrusive
methods for conducting policy research, considering our research interests have
considerable overlap.  One area my
research has focused on is the post office, specifically, mailing newspapers
during the nineteenth century.  There has

I decided to completely rewrite my post from last week, but I think this will work for both the method and the paper topic.

As the election day is drawing closer, I want to know in advance which area is supporting Democrats or Republicans. Usually survey is used in calculating the attitudes of people before election day. But if we could calculate the sales of books about the two candidates (or four) in a particular area as an unobtrusive way, it may be useful. My question is: is there a relationship between the sale of books about politicians (or other self-promotion publications) and the outcome of an election, so that we can predict outcome of elections from book sales in the future?

Technology has inundated our social spaces; indeed, technology often dictates how social spaces are used and who has access to those spaces to begin with.  One of my research interests is how humans use technology to mediate their relationships with other members of our species.  Simply put, I seek to understand how technology is used as a way of constructing, and performing, the roles one acquires in their relationships.