Blogging astrophysics, shaping the self. Content-mediated Identity negotiation and peer group adjustment in a sample of astrophysicists’ blogs

Abstract

Research blogging has received a rather good amount of attention from the scholarly literature, but not in the domain of astrophysics. In the present paper, three active astrophysicists’ blogs have been chosen from a previously retrieved wider corpus and analyzed against the pivotal theory of identity shaping in an online setting. The study, which is essentially mixed-methods, has built on Susan Herring’s definition of computer-mediated conversation and focusses on content analysis as well as on content-based interaction (comments and replies per subject). Special care was taken on ensuring bloggers’ and commenters’ anonimity, in compliance with the British Psychological Society Ethics Guidelines. These blogs’ conversational capacity has emerged and the hypothesis of some degree of professional identity negotiation results to be confirmed, with implications on the invisible colleges. The context is that of an interdisciplinary, provisional junction between ground-based linguistic fieldwork in a 2.0 online setting and the search for appropriate theoretical frameworks about unconscious or semi-conscious aims of communication in a scholarly environment.