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…

Monday 31 December

I have spent all day in librarian mode – organising references and tidying up where I have got to so far. This is a little bit like colouring in revision timetables, in that it feels useful but doesn’t really get one on any further. However, as a good librarian I know that the more structure I put around my literature searching at these very early stages, the easier it will be to find and cross reference articles later. Noting why I think something is or isn’t relevant now will no doubt be very useful six or twelve months down the line when whatever reasons I had today have been lost in the mists of time.

I have generated a number of topic areas from the articles I’ve found from my less structured ‘Oh that looks interesting and I wonder if it’s subsequently been cited’ searching over the last couple of days. Well, it is holiday time.

So far, then, the literature I’ve found falls into one or more of the following categories:

• Traditional authority/ hierarchy and the internet
• Website usability and evaluation (but not yet found anything that looks at religious websites, it’s all ecommerce)
• Surveys and predictions (the Future of the Internet, as seen from 1995)
• Descriptions/ analysis of online religion and virtual communities
• Cross cultural comparisons
• Comparative areas – e.g. health websites/ public organisations/ PR
• Church use of the internet (this is the smallest pool so far and I wish it was the largest!)

Reading

I’ve been reading a 1996 Master’s dissertation related to my topic: ‘A study of internet use by Christian churches and organisations.’ It’s really interesting but what struck me most is how much it reads like a historical document – how the vocabulary, techniques and tools from 11 years ago seem very antiquated when compared to all this Web 2.0 malarkey.

Thursday 28th December … minor trauma

Today is the first day that I have set aside for working on the project. It is not going so well so far.

I have struggled to log in to databases via Athens – it took two hours to get a temporary fix. And I feel like I have been going round in circles all day… now it’s nearly 3pm and so far I have managed to arrange a noticeboard.

The things I need to do are:

• write up notes from the supervision meeting on 14th December
• write some blurb for my entry on the department’s website
• find the list of contacts from a meeting with the Church of England
• contact the librarian at All Nations (who is also a part time research student at Loughborough)
• generate a list of search terms for interrogating databases
• make a list of useful journals and their locations, and sign up for RSS feeds to those that use RSS publish their contents

Oh, and start running some meaningful searches.

Point of the blog…

I’ve just registered as a part-time PhD student at Loughborough University. My research is loosely described as ’stuff about religion on the internet.’ I’m creating this blog as a space to record progress, ask questions, ponder, and find the way forward.

Since it is the 21st century, and the research is about information and the internet, a blog seemed the way to go.