Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

Reading Polkinghorne, I see my commitment to narrative inquiry and blogs becoming all the stronger and intertwined. Narrative captures knowledge that the positivist methods of the natural sciences can't. Narrative captures more than knowledge; it captures the wisdom that Laszlo and Laszlo see as an essential part of social knowledge management. Blogs are the tool to capture those narratives and the meaning and wisdom they carry.

Interlibrary Loan is my Santa Claus. Three books -- real books! words on paper! -- came a zooming my way Friday from the efficient folks at USD. The weekend found me getting acquainted with Donald E. Polkinghorne's Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences.

Among things I'd like to do is a South Dakota blogosphere census. Just how many bloggers are there? How much content are they generating? How many ideas and conversations are we capturing online? How does that content measure up to the content generated by professional media?

Welcome to my dissertation on social knowledge management, scholarly personal narrative, and the South Dakota blogosphere! I'll be thinking out loud here, capturing some ideas, recording observations, and banging them into some reasonably organized research and argumentation about the capacity of self-organizing communities of users achieving the goals of social knowledge management.

As my advisor and I discussed the dissertation, he asked me what distinguishes scholarly personal narrative from other methodologies. He is suspicious (perhaps rightly so) of the claim that SPN is a whole 'nother methodology, that it isn't just a flavor or a rewording of some other methodology. He'd be more comfortable if it were; he says claiming to have a new methodology is an invitation for slings and arrows.

I just had the kind of thought that should make a doctoral candidate's blood run cold: what if my whole thesis is an oxymoron?

I'm looking at the South Dakota blogosphere as a manifestation of self-organizing social knowledge management. And just now I thought, wait a minute: where's the management? No one tells bloggers what to write, or when, or how much. No one hires or fires bloggers. And no one has to read any of what the bloggers write.

Welcome to the new home of my dissertation! I am enjoying using Wordpress for my DSU blog, but the Wordpress pages on my theme weren't working the way I wanted them to. Among other things, I had to build my own contents pages for the child pages, and the sidebar was looking rather messy. I have a little more control over my Drupal installation, so I'm going to try migrating the show over here. Wish me luck!