Blog author characteristics

One important task when analysing the genre of any text is to look at the discourse community that produces the text. The table below illustrates the general characteristics of the blog authors in the present study.

Table 4: General blog author characteristics

Characteristic Frequency Percentage

One author 26 86.7

Male 18.5 61.7

Located in USA 19 63.3

Full name 24 80.0

Graphical representation 20 66.7

It is apparent from this table that the majority (26 out of 30) of the blogs in the study were created and maintained by a single individual. The prevalent gender of the blog authors was male with 18.5 bloggers, compared to the amount of 9.5 of the blogs being maintained by female bloggers. Even though the blogs were collected from various English-speaking universities and blog directories around the world, the majority of the blogs (19 out of 30) was

written by residents of the United States. Seven of the blogs were written by bloggers living in the U.K. and the remaining four blogs were from Sweden with two instances, and Australia and Italy, both with one instance. According to the data, authors of academic research blogs do not tend to hide behind pseudonyms, with 24 blog authors giving their full name in their blogs. Displaying a graphical representation of the author was rather common, with 20 bloggers providing a photo of themselves in the blog.

The data on general blog author characteristics provide interesting differences when compared to the findings of the genre analysis of blogs in general by Herring et al.

(2004). The demographical characteristics of gender and geographical location follow the results of Herring et al. with approximately similar percentages of male and female authors and the prevalence of U.S. bloggers. However, very striking differences arise when looking at how much information bloggers give about themselves. In the study of Herring et al., only 31.4% of the blogs displayed the blog author’s full real name, whereas the percentage is considerably higher in this study (80.0%). In addition, Herring et al. (2004: 5–6) found that only 17.5% of blog authors provided any graphical representation of themselves, which is a much lower percentage than the 66.7 per cent of the research bloggers in the present study showing a real or drawn image of themselves. The age of the bloggers was not taken into account when looking at the characteristics of blog authors, because most of the bloggers did not share any information on their age, and therefore there was not enough data on the age of the bloggers to allow for any analysis or generalisations.

For the academic system to work, it is necessary to have a clear hierarchical system within the university staff (Walker 2006: 2–4). To find out if this hierarchical system is displayed in academic blogs, the blogs were coded for whether they provided information on the author’s title and university rank. Table 6 below presents the academic titles that the blog authors displayed in their blogs.

Table 5: Blog author title

Title Frequency Percentage

Postdoctoral researcher 10 33.3

Professor 6 20.0

Doctor 5 16.7

PhD student 4 13.3

Associate professor 2 6.7

N/A 2 6.7

The most common title in the data set was postdoctoral researcher, with one third of the blog authors defining themselves as ‘postdocs’. Titles professor, doctor and PhD student were distributed quite evenly, with six, five and four per cent, respectively. Two bloggers defined themselves as associate professors. What is notable is that only two blog authors had decided not to reveal their university rank.

So, a staggering 93.3% of the blog authors displayed their title. This is a very high frequency considering that Herring et al. (2004: 5) found that only 55% of blogs in general mention the blog author’s occupation. It seems that the importance of hierarchy in the academia is also present in the academic blogosphere, and it is manifested by the common habit of mentioning one’s academic rank in one’s blog.

As mentioned earlier in the theory section of this study, Stuart (2006: 392) proposes that hard sciences tend to produce fewer blogs than soft ones. In order to find out if this was the case in the material collected for this study, the blogs were categorised according to the field of science the blog belongs to. Table 7 below shows the summary of different fields represented in the data set.

Table 6: Field of science

Field of Science Frequency Percentage

Medicinal studies 4 13.3

Physics 4 13.3

Mathematical studies 4 13.3

History 3 10.0

Law and political science 3 10.0

English 3 10.0

Geo studies 3 10.0

Culture studies 2 6.7

Biological studies 2 6.7

Other 2 6.7

From the table above we can see that the academic blogs analysed in this study represent different fields of science very evenly. Most common were medicinal studies (in more detail, medicine, biomedical engineering, epidemiology and psychiatry), physics (physics and astrophysics), and mathematical studies, all with four blogs representing each field. Next came law and political science, geo studies (in detail, archaeology, geology and geography) and English, each field being represented by three blogs in the data. Culture studies were represented by one blog about culture studies and one about anthropology. Another two blogs were represented by biological studies. Two blogs, the fields of which were ethics and

‘complexification studies’ were difficult to categorise in any way, so they were grouped together in the category of other fields.

The data shows that academic research blogs are being written about a diverse selection of different academic fields. What is more, there seems to be no prevalence of soft science blogs over those of hard science.