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This thesis describes a linguistic investigation of individual differences in online personal diaries, or 'blogs.' There is substantial evidence of gender differences in language (Lakoff, 1975), and to a lesser extent linguistic projection of personality (Pennebaker & King, 1999). Recent work has investigated these latter differences in the area of computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically e-mail (Gill, 2004). This thesis employs a number of analytic techniques, both top-down (dictionary-based) and bottom-up (data-driven), in order to explore personality and gender differences in the language of blogs. A corpus was constructed by asking authors to submit a month of text and complete a sociobiographic questionnaire. The corpus consists of over 400,000 words and five-factor personality data (Buchanan, 2001) for 71 subjects. The thesis begins by framing blogs in the context of other genres, both CMC and traditional, in order to show both the distinctiveness and representativeness of the genre. Top-down content analysis techniques are then employed to investigate the relationship between personality and linguistic features. A number of features correlate with each trait, but upon regression, very little variance is explained. Bottom-up techniques are more successful. The corpus was stratified into high, low and neutral personality groups to identify distinctive collocations for each. Returning to the raw personality scores, it becomes clear that even a small amount of n-gram context helps account for much more variance in personality. A measure of contextuality (Heylighen & Dewaele, 2002) shows that authors considered high in Agreeableness pay more attention to differences between their extra-linguistic context and that of their audience. Attention turns to gender, where similar methods are applied to investigate gender differences in language. Many previous findings are confirmed in the blog corpus. In addition, women are found to write more in their blogs than men. More generally, using the British National Corpus, it is shown that women are more contextual, except in the least contextual of genres (academic writing) where there is no difference. The study concludes by confirming that both gender and personality are projected by language in blogs; furthermore, approaches which take the context of language features into account can be used to detect more variation than those which do not.

An investigation of news consumers' self-reported news source preferences, frequency of media consumption, and perceptions of news bias and credibility was performed to understand where news consumers are receiving news content and judgments of credibility in mainstream and new media. A Web-based survey distributed to the Rochester Institute of Technology community was completed by 107 respondents. Results confirm previous findings that news consumers are more likely to have a higher frequency of consumption of media they perceive as credible. Results confirm the shift to online media where consumers report they are receiving their news. New findings brought forth by the present study provide insight on a direction for future research.

Deaf people represent a minority group usually considered disabled. However, about 300,000 Deaf Americans do not identify themselves as disabled, but rather as members of a cultural and linguistic group. The Internet has become a useful tool for Deaf people to communicate about this culture and work toward equality in the hearing world. Weblogs in particular have become a popular vehicle for communication in the Deaf world. The present study examined the degree to which Deaf authors of weblogs discuss personal empowerment and encourage the empowerment of the Deaf community through Internet weblogs. Three months of eight weblogs authored by nine members of the Deaf community were analyzed for personal and community level empowerment and Deaf cultural perspectives. Over 400 weblog entries were analyzed using qualitative methodology. Results suggest that Deaf bloggers frequently discuss community level empowerment and rarely discuss personal level empowerment. These bloggers demonstrated five main approaches to empowerment: encouraging and organizing members to action, disseminating information, highlighting members' abilities and contributions, using themedia to influence perceptions of mainstream society, and discussing injustice and oppression. Results also provide empirical support of previous literature on Deaf cultural perspectives. Implications of Deaf perspectives and community level empowerment strategies for working with the Deaf community are discussed.

In this study I scrutinize blogs written by American expatriates in China of the 21st century. Two primary objectives are involved. One is to explore how China is represented in such blogs. The other is to understand the discursive processes through which the American bloggers utilize the blogging technology to narrate their (mis)conceptions of the Chinese realities. Equally important to these two focuses is an emphasis on revealing a delicate interplay between the production of the digital discourses about contemporary China in blog sphere, the bloggers’ assumptions of the Chinese government’s encompassing control of the Internet, and the surging nationalism exhibited by the Chinese readers of the blogs.Drawing from the postcolonial and discursive perspectives of Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, David Spurr, and Nicolas Clifford, I see those blogs not merely as a platform for self expression, an open field of identity experiment, or a grassroots journalistic outlet. Rather, I argue that the blogs examined here consist of a distinct discursive space of cultural representation and contestation. They are also interpreted as a digital extension of conventional Euro-American travel writing as they share with the genre a set of rhetorical conventions and face the same set of problems of representing the cultural Other. These assumptions guided the multimodal discourse analyses of the blogs by three American individuals. The study revealed that the bloggers used three prominent metaphors to convey their perceptions of contemporary China, which echo the conventional Western knowledge of the county. During the process, the bloggers are concerned with the Chinese censorship of the Internet and give little attention to the challenge voiced by nationalistic Chinese readers.

This study investigates the impact of an online community's control structure on the knowledge sharing process in that community. Using a framework comprised of legitimate peripheral participation theory and the weak-ties phenomenon, the study focuses on a comparative analysis of self-organizing online communities (e.g., weblog networks) and centralized online communities (e.g., discussion forums communities) with respect to the efficacy of knowledge sharing in these communities. The findings of this study indicate that self-organizing communities of practice have more weak-ties among their members compared to centralized communities. As per weak-ties theory of Granovetter (1973, 1983), these findings suggest that self-organizing communities facilitate greater dissemination of knowledge and flow of information among their members than centralized communities. The abundance of weak-ties in their community structure also makes self-organizing communities better environments for the discovery of new information compared to centralized community environments. This study did not find any evidence of community structure impact on peripheral participation and the interaction activity level among peripheral participants of a given online community. These observations may have stemmed from the limitations of research design, however, it is safe to say as of now that verdict on peripheral participation differences in different community structures is inconclusive at best.

The objective of this study is to determine how museums might incorporate the use of online publishing and communication technologies as a tool to initiate and foster connections with their audiences. This research is designed with the expectation that it will contribute to knowledge regarding how such communication technologies are understood and received. The ultimate goal is to help museums and cultural institutions develop comparable interactive capacities that encourage dialogue and more deeply engage the communities they serve. In this study, a review of literature and extant online communities will be used to inform the development of a prototype online museum community that demonstrates how such an interface might extend an institution’s education, public relations, and community outreach capabilities. A refined online museum community prototype based on this research may be of use to museums aiming to construct an online museum community that both reflects the institution’s character and furthers its educational objectives.

Students are motivated to use technology to write. Using this idea, teachers can assimilate what the students are already doing through personal websites/blogs and classroom content with a meaningful audience. Students, no matter gender or ability level, need to see that writing is a vehicle to show individual thought on subjects, and that this is powerful. Technology, such as web logs, can provide one part of the answer, but educators should recognize that the key to conscientious writing among students is that the students need to be a more active part of the educational community. The aim of this study is to shed light on a range of student needs, and show that the differing or ranges in levels of motivation to write with consideration for an audience can be addressed through web logs. A very real audience is out “there,” the Internet, for students to use.

Este es un libro sobre los weblogs, sus autores los bloguers y la cultura que están generando, la blogosfera, escrito de forma didáctica para quienes quieran formar parte de una de las más innovadoras tendencias del nuevo siglo.

This dissertation examines the public and private nature of personal weblogs written by adolescent girls. During a four-month observation period, the participants continue to post material to their weblogs and the posts during that time are available for examination and analysis. There is also an email interview and an end-of-study questionnaire that lend an inside view to the process. The reflection, collaboration, and mentoring that these blogs enable act as a feminist space as well as a personal one uniquely qualified for investigating identity. At the same time, the intersection of writing, introspection, and digital tools also lends the possibility of answering another feminist goal, that is expressed in AAUW’s Tech Savvy of bringing more girls to the sciences and to make them more comfortable in digital spaces. I propose that identity development and the need for a space that is both public and private may be behind the steady increase proportionately and numerically of adolescent girls in the LiveJournal user base. From April 2004 to April 2005 the increase has been steady, with the female user base rising from 65.2% to 67.3%, the majority of those being between the ages of 15 and 21 as per the statistics on April 30, 2005. This indicates that a need is being filled and provides an important part of the rationale for my study. It is significant also because by sheer numbers, adolescent girls in personal weblogs are making the definition of what acceptable public discourse is more diffuse and inclusive.

The once private traditional written diary is shifting to an electronic storytelling tradition. Online diaries or weblogs are a growing phenomenon that scholars have ignored until recently. This qualitative project uses narrative and rhetorical analysis to focus on storytelling themes in weblogs, rituals in storytelling and the similarities and differences from traditional written diaries. In this study, 30 weblogs were chosen from three web domains: livejournal.com, blogger.com and diarest.net. The findings show that weblogs are filled with rich storytelling that emulates many qualities of traditional diaries. In general, weblogs authors are communicating stories online to an interactive mass audience and forming new rituals in a new electronic forum.