Small Strokes Big Oaks

As most of you know, my thesis project is about Literacy in the Feminist Blogging Community.  As part of this project, I am required to create an annotated bibliography and write a literature review.  I haven’t made it through nearly all of my sources yet, but I wanted to post the draft of 4 annotations I have so far for a few reasons.  First, I’d love some feedback from those of you who have had to dredge through this before.  Second, I wanted to inspire you all to look at some of these sources!  They’re really great resources for anyone interested in feminism, blogging, or literacy.

Annotated Bibliography

Androutsopoulos, Jannis.  “Potentials and Limitations of Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography.” Language@Internet, 5 (2008), article 9. 7 July 2009 <http://www.languageatinternet.de>.

Berryman-Fink, Cynthia, Et al.  “Blogging About Feminist Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender.”  Women & Language 31.2 (Fall 2008): 26-35. Academic Search Complete.  EBSCO.  Elmhurst College Library, Elmhurst, IL.  30 Sep 2009 < http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

Friedman, Jaclyn.  “Blogging While Female: Cyberintimidation crosses a line.”  Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture (Summer 2007): 17-17.  Academic Search Complete.  EBSCO.  Elmhurst College Library, Elmhurst, IL.  30 Sep 2009 < http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

This article originally appeared in Bitch Magazine, which has a primarily female audience.  Friedman writes about Kathy Sierra, a techie and blogger who has entered into the primarily male world of technology with some terrible consequences.  Just because she was female, she received several threats online, and Friedman details how she fought back against these threats.  Friedman also brings up the point that women are not typically accepted in the blogging and technology world.  This article, although not scholarly in its tone, will be very helpful to me in defining an online feminist community and the challenges women face when trying to make their blogs successful.  Also, on my questionnaire that I will be using to interview the bloggers, I will be asking them about a time they were misunderstood on their blog.  This article will help me think about what it means to be misunderstood, and will provide a frame of reference when talking about why the bloggers I’m interviewing received some of the comments they have.

Levy, Steven.  “Blogging Beyond the Men’s Club.”  Newsweek 145.12 (12 Mar. 2005): 16-16.  Academic Search Complete.  EBSCO. Elmhurst College Library, Elmhurst, IL.  30 Sep 2009 < http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

This Newsweek article appeared in 2005 after a Harvard conference on bloggers and the media.  In it Levy questions, and rightfully so, the lack of diversity in the blogosphere.   He questions that the smartest and best bloggers will rise to the top, since all of the bloggers at the top seemed to be white and male.  He posits that this is because blogs are judged by how many people link to them, and as it appeared after that conference, white male bloggers were linking to other white male bloggers.  He also provides a few suggestions as to how to promote diversity online.  This article will be extremely helpful in my discussion about female bloggers and the challenges they face while trying to break into the blogosphere.  Also, I plan on using a section of my project to discuss the diversity of my interview participants, and this article will go a long way toward helping me talk about why there are so few women at the top.

Lindquist, Julie and David Seitz.  The Elements of Literacy.  New York: Longman, 2009.

As a textbook, this was very informative and user-friendly in my Seminar in Literacy class this summer.  I use several passages out of this book to compose my theoretical framework and my method for analysis of my interviews about the literacy events of feminist bloggers.  The chapters in this book include an introduction to literacy, discussions about literacy and the mind, literacy and culture, literacy and class, literacy and work, and literacy and technology.  These chapters all look at different literacy theorists and use the theories to analyze literacy events from every day life.  I hope to emulate some of this analysis in my own project.  I anticipate the chapters about technology, culture, and mind will be particularly helpful to me as I discuss blogging, feminism, and the individual literacy practices of the bloggers participating in my interview.

Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd.  “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.”  The Norton Book of Composition.  Susan Miller, ed.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.  1450-1473.

This is a scholarly article written primarily for those interested in the history of blogging as a genre.  In this article, Miller and Shepherd set out analyzing blogs in order to discover many things about blogs, including why blogging caught on so quickly, what the motivations behind bloggers are, what rhetorical work blogs perform and how they perform this work, and how to define blogs as a genre.  In order to answer these questions, Miller and Shepherd analyzed a random selection of personal blogs, well-known blogs, and evaluative criteria within blogging communities.  Miller and Shepherd do a good job of looking at the history of blogs, as well as the history surrounding their emergence.  However, this article is a bit outdated.  They seem to be looking only at personal and famous blogs, not at activist blogs like the ones I will be analyzing.  They also do not work with bloggers as authors of this genre, but rather focus just on the blogs themselves.  The article is helpful to me, however, in looking at the emergence of blogs and their history, and is very helpful to me in defining blogs as a genre.

Morgan-Curtis, Samantha A.  “Blogging as a Capstone and Continuing Project.  Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources 27.2/3 (Winter/Spring 2006): 19-20. Academic Search Complete.  EBSCO.  Elmhurst College Library, Elmhurst, IL.  30 Sep 2009 < http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

Rosser, Sue V. “Through the Lenses of Feminist Theory: Focus on Women and Information Technology.” Frontiers 26.1 2005. 1-23. Web. 30 Sep 2009. Project Muse. Retrieved at Elmhurst College Library.

Watt, Jenn.  “Blogging Busts Out for Women.”  Herizons 20.1 (Summer 2006): 7-7. Academic Search Complete.  EBSCO.  Elmhurst College Library, Elmhurst, IL.  30 Sep 2009 < http://search.ebscohost.com/>.