Major catch-up post

So, where were we? Oh yes. .. PhD in progress. It is, at least, still in progress. I passed my first year viva in November last year, and am currently working on two aspects of the research. My first year report is here.

1. Longitudinal sample

The very nice man at findachurch.co.uk gave me a method by which I can use the database to assemble a random sample. I am collecting 100 each of Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Baptist churches across England. I will track these churches at regular intervals over the next couple of years to see if the presence or absence of websites changes.

2. Content analysis

The major meat of the project is the content analysis of websites. What are churches saying about themselves and their faith? And are they doing it nicely? So I have been pulling together the kinds of elements considered by other research, and a few ideas of my own, to create my content analysis tool.

I’m also carrying a couple of articles and a text book on research methodology around with me, with the intention to start the justification for why I think CA is the best tool for the project. But sadly I keep falling asleep on the train home and not reading them.

Deadlines sharpen the mind

I seem to only be posting here either just after or just prior to a supervision meeting. I wonder if this suggests what my motivations are…

My next trip to Loughborough is on 30 September and I need to be sending a first draft of my first year report in a week ahead of that. So that would be in roughly two weeks’ time. It’s not that I can’t write 5,000 words in two weeks, I have no fear of that. I just can’t necessarily write 5,000 good or coherent or useful words in that time. My time off in July bombed, for various reasons, some better than others. I’ve not really read very much lately; and not really with a good excuse other than tiredness.

So I’ve spent a wet weekend catching up on what I needed to read; and variously moving papers between themed piles in order to generate the review headings I probably ought to have finalised in June. Actually it’s been better than I had hoped, once I convinced myself out of a slight panic yesterday when feeling I had to write it all by COB Saturday 6th!

The dog ate my homework

This, in effect, is as much as I had to say to my supervisors in a telephone conference last Wednesday. I was jolly glad I didn’t travel all the way to Loughborough for a 25 min meeting where I was gently chastised and told to get on with it.

The daft thing is that I had done, and blogged, some of the thinking needed (see the previous post to this one); but in the busyness of Everything Else that’s happening, I had totally forgotten I’d posted this stuff.

If that’s not a salutory lesson, I don’t know what is.

It seems today that my mental machinery is working fairly well and I have for the first time come up with a good and clear statement of aims for the project which I have recorded under the ‘Project aims – July 2008′ page.

Reading

It’s a rainy holiday Monday and therefore a perfect day to be at home reading through the articles I have located.

My work in the last few weeks has focused on some of the administrative tasks I need to perform. I’d be interested in understanding how a full time student’s time might be broken down into admin/ teaching/ research over the course of their three years.

I had 48 hours as a student in Loughborough a couple of weeks ago. I attended a training course on ‘What is a literature review?’ which when I booked it, in February, I thought would be a box-ticking exercise as I’d have written most of the review by then. That turned out to be a wildly optimistic thought and so the course was a very helpful way of thinking about the approach I could take. I also went to a compulsory induction day; again, I thought this would be mostly irrelevant but it did help to clarify some of the administrative hoops I have to jump through.

Since then I have been reading; thinking about my research questions and trying to formulate them clearly; also drafting a second and better set of headings for the literature review. Here’s where I am at so far:

Review headings

How do Churches make use of internet technology to inform and for communication?
Enthusiasm – collection of quotes saying how marvellous the internet is.

1. Religion online
a) Definitions and discussions

b) Feasibility

c) Christianity and other religions

2. Replicating church online

a) Major projects

b) Rituals online

3. Churches using the internet

a) What are they using it for?

b) How and why?

b) Christianity and other religions

Research questions, aims and objectives

Research questions

1. To what extent do churches see themselves in a role as online information providers? What kind of information is being published and why?
2. To what extent are churches engaging with the internet and new media channels of communication?
3. To what extent are UK-based internet users connecting online for religious purposes? Are existing communities being enhanced, new ones established or is there a mixture of both?
4. To what extent is the internet, with its perceived lack of boundaries and unregulated content seen as an appropriate medium of communication by the established Church?

Aims and objectives

• Evaluate the content, currency, and prevalence of UK church websites:

Investigate and assess existing methodologies for evaluation
Assess and develop content analysis framework

• Assess the Church’s attitude towards the internet; its facilitation or otherwise of Web 2.0 initiatives and authority views on these initiatives.

Investigate online community participation in the UK, establish baselines for the level of interaction and compare and contrast this with faith-based communities.

Waste of a day

This morning at 11am (after having catalogued church library books for 90min) I started a simple job.

1. Add some notes to selected references in refworks
2. Export the file
3. Use the data for a mail merge to make a sheet for extracting data to.

30min tops. 40min if I faff with the mail merge.

FOUR HOURS LATER… I am just finished.

Busman’s holiday

I’ve spend the whole day re-running database searches and documenting the results. I’ve now got 51 references from which to draw the initial pool of articles for review. In eight months of searches, both haphazard and more ordered, I’ve found a grand total of two, count them, two – papers that look directly at the content and structure of church websites.

STURGILL, A., 2004. Scope and purposes of church Web sites. Journal of Media and Religion, 3(3), pp. 165-176.

CARR, M., 2004. The use of online information sources as a tool for mission by Parish Churches. Journal of Religious and Theological Information, 6(2), pp. 51-85.

I’ve got 49 others that may well be useful, but this is it in terms of things that are directly related to my topic.

Why’s this a busman’s holiday? Because today is Saturday, and I frequently spend the day at work doing exactly this sort of thing.

Next supervision meeting

I have my second supervision meeting on March 3rd. I want to know what to do next – I’m not expecting to be told this, there aren’t neat handouts with timescales on!

I have a bunch of potential headings for the literature review. It’s something to discuss, a framework on which to hang my reading. It has been hard at times to put a structure to it, when I have such a random collection of papers to read. Some are technical; others talk about health websites or e-commerce; I’ve got international surveys, statistics, and studies. What I haven’t got is a core collection of UK-based discussions.

 Headings

• utopian vs dystopian

• online religion vs religion online – Helland

Authority

• changes in the authority over the sacred text, its format and delivery

• internet used to attack Christian theology

• undermining authority – traditional hierarchy vs internet peer to peer – possibility of wrong information out there

Ritual

• is virtually meeting inferior to real meeting

• is this actually about having all singing all dancing multimedia accessible virtual worship (with bells on) or just about continuing to do what churches have always done, but with a web based shop window as well as a physical location…

• it’s about the ritual and community of religion and the academic voice does not allow for the discussion of the supernatural ritual vs experience

• Hutchinson 2007 p254… the future of online religious activity depends on the ability of the Internet to enable recognisable religious experiences to take place

 Identity

• are virtual rituals or ones performed remotely still legitimate?

“some practices are transformed by the technology, and may detract from the sense of a religious gathering: verbal exchanges become shorter, emotional solidarity with co-participants is weaker, and there is less orderliness to the prayer meetings” – Schroeder, Heather & Lee 1998

• expectation that the internet would be revolutionary and all sorts of dreary old fashioned face to face communications would be swept aside

   

• anonymity reduces responsibility – Clough 2002 in Hutchings 2007

• real religious affiliations are part of everyday life so it’s not suprising that they were transferred to digital networks

(“online community becomes a supplement for individuals seeking to extend their religious practice into their daily technological uses” – C&C 2005 p275)

• anonymity/ flexibility of space

• space for dissent / non conformism

• gender/ orientation free space

• public fora – cheap

Community / relationships

• communities brought together – diaspora – Helland

• would digital networks affect the nature and quality of relationships?

‘text based and largely asynchronous’ – Dawson

• is a virtual church a legitimate form of community? Can you have a community online? – Dawson says no/ Campbell 2005 says yes

(is this a change of perception over time?)

• is virtually meeting inferior to real meeting – Dixon 1997 Cyberchurch – Dawson

• Six markers of community (relationship – care – value – intimate communication – connection – shared faith – Campbell & Caldernon 2007 referring to Campbell 2005)

• Campbell & Calderon looks at content analysis of bulletin boards on a Christian musician’s website for evidence of community – conclude that it is

• look how printing changed the world and expect the internet to have a similar information accessibility revolution

From papyrus onwards, every major development in communications has provided new channels through which the gospel is proclaimed. Cyberspace is no exception. CofE

Regional studies

• Korea

• Africa

• Israel

Church web presence in the UK

Internet use and connectivity

 

 

Next stage…

It’s interlibrary loan time!

A 2004 book is ancient history

The Dawson & Cowen book arrived yesterday, which is great. Started reading on the train home, it’s got lots of useful comments and suggestions.

However, it’s relatively recent (2004) but some of the papers are older. Even 2004 is a long time in web use; the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon (however you choose to define it) has changed a lot of the way ‘the Internet’ is created and managed. Does the more collaboratively constructed web still have the same problems as a hierarchical web site may have had? YouTube makes us all potentially broadcasters so how does that affect distinctions that have been drawn in past examinations of different kinds of media?

So already the pages are covered in question marks with things to follow up and try to place in a very contemporary context.

Other disciplines don’t have this problem do they? Opinions change, I suppose, regarding authors or poems, for example. But the thing being examined isn’t such a moveable feast (unless it’s an in-depth examination of the WRVS’ contribution to Meals on Wheels). 2004 feels too historical already.

Amazon bargain, dearth of UK information

I am very pleased as I have just found a copy of a book that looks like it is going to be fairly crucial on Amazon for £14. Much cheaper than getting bits of it from the BL. It’s called Religion Online: Finding faith on the internet, a 2004 collection edited by Lorne Dawson and Douglas Cowan. Pretty much everything I have read so far has referenced at least one article from this collection so I am very keen to find out what all the fuss is about.

But, I bet there is nothing talking about the experiences of UK Christians/ churches and the internet. You’d think that we were a technological backwater; so far I have found nothing – no interest, no writing, no recent research on what’s happening in the UK. Yet the first search engine directory I looked at had 45,000+ church websites listed. So there must be something going on here…