The Snowpocalypse cancelled our week on Social Media and Political Activism, but we still need to get into those blogospheres! The Blogosphere Creation might seem a little hard to put your finger on, but, well, that’s because blogospheres are multifaceted and sometimes disunified by their very nature. On Week 6 we’ll all be loosely committing to a blogosphere to engage with for the rest of the semester, so now is the time to start investigating. Here are some tips for finding a blogosphere niche:
- Think about some social justice and/or activist causes that interest you or that you would like to learn about
- If you’re not familiar with your topic, do some background research online (or if you really want to nerd out, search for your topic in Credo Reference or Oxford Reference Online). (I’m sorry, the librarianness is hard to suppress. But for realz about the reference sources. They are helpful).
- With your background information in mind, start searching for blogs about your topic. This can be as simple as searching in Google: “food sustainability blogs.” Make sure you try searching with a variety of related terms (there’s the librarian again!). When I tried “food justice blogs” I got results with a different political slant. Start perusing blogs and getting an idea of current conversations.
- Let the first blogs you find lead you into a web of other information–read linked blog articles, find the people writing the articles on Twitter. You’ll start to develop a web of sources that are in conversation about your topic.
- Depending on your topic, you might encounter more mainstream news sites as well. For example, if you are looking at movements for healthcare access, people in the blogosphere might be referencing mainstream news and magazine articles. It is ok to engage with these, but make sure you are focusing on the blogosphere.
Sometimes professors compare starting research on a scholarly topic to walking into the middle of a party that’s been going on for awhile. A lot of conversation already took place before you got there, and it can feel a little overwhelming. It’s similar with entering a blogosphere, but at these parties people are wearing Converse instead of cocktail dresses. So have fun!
For now, you can try looking into a few different blogospheres to see what interests you, but you should have a basic idea of what you’ll be following by class on Week 6 (although you might end up narrowing it down as the semester goes on).
Remember for class this Wednesday–write a blog post about our Week 4 readings and come with some ideas about your Bizzarro Research “Paper.”