Like in many PhD programs, my comprehensive exams included an element that was intended to help me prepare for my dissertation proposal, dissertation, and dissertation defense. Building off of my research interests and experiences up to that point, my advisor wrote me a lengthy question asking me to define and describe simulation games—the intent, of course, being that at least some of this could be worked into a literature review for a dissertation.

I got word that a recent publication of mine was now published in an issue of Learning, Media, and Technology. It has actually been available online first for the past ten months, but since I haven’t been good about blogging about recent publications, I figured this was as good a chance as any to write a post about it. This piece is called “Lifting the Veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An Investigation of Educational Marketplace Offerings and Downloads” and is a collaboration with Catharyn Shelton, Matt Koehler, and Jeff Carpenter. Matt web scraped over four million pages associated with resources from the TpT platform, and we took a quantiative descriptive look at resource metadata, including subject areas, grade levels, resource types, Common Core State Standards, user ratings, and prices across those resources. We then interpreted our findings through José van Dijck’s writing on embedded values on digital platforms—this was my first real dive into van Dijck, and I’m particularly proud of that contribution. Here’s the abstract for more of a peek:

Just used the phrase ‘hashtag ontology’ in a draft manuscript, and I think that will keep me happy the rest of the day.

Do other internet researchers find themselves citing journalists to explain things like memes? Or am I just not reading the right scholarly sources?

I think it’s funny (but delightful) that my secondary area of research has gotten more media attention than what I was specifically trained to do.

Just reread “Superman Smashes the Klan” after a day that involved checking up on Gab for research purposes, and I believe more than ever that this is one of the best and most important comics of our time. 📚

One of those afternoons where I’m auditing someone’s analysis code, but it’s an analysis of 4M rows of data, so I’m also doing spurts of grading while I wait for code to execute.

Looks like it’s “I’m going to need some banana bread and chocolate chips to make it through the rest of this response to reviewers letter” o’clock.

I am not sure what I was expecting when I started looking for Mormon* content on Gab, but “we should get the missionaries on this platform” wasn’t it.

I have been a fan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a while, but I’m just now discovering how useful it can be for internet research 😍😍😍

Sometimes I don’t realize how excited I am about a study until I write the conference proposal for it… which then just makes me more nervous about getting accepted.

Responding to reviewer who has a specific picture in their head of what “good” edtech research “should” look like. Thus, they’re confused by things in my paper that I’m sure aren’t problems—but don’t fit that picture.

Unexpected topics in research meetings: The difficulty of choosing English translations for French swearing in your data.

Trying to do revisions on an article that isn’t my best work and that I don’t really love is haaaaaaard. I’m committed enough to the core idea to see things through, but I’m also tempted to tell the reviewers that they win and I’m out.

My first rule as a low-budget Twitter researcher is to collect interesting data first, ask (research) questions later. I have a lot of data I’ve never used, but I’d rather deal with that than a missed opportunity.

Just had a paper rejected from a special issue, but the journal has been such a pain to work with over the last 8(!) months that I’m frankly just glad it’s over.

I got a reminder today that I do the kind of research where something as hilariously unintuitive as telling a program to treat long numbers as “words made up of 0-9” is actually a critical step to making sure you get the right results.

Returning proofs for an accepted article is always fun!

I’m trying to succinctly describe a Latter-day Saint “solemn assembly” in an academic manuscript, and it’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

Have not made as much writing progress today as I’d like, but today’s progress has validated both my use of a structured folder system as a “reference manager” AND my decision to memorize the keyboard shortcut for French guillemets.

This week, I will be putting my nose to the grindstone to meet the deadline for submitting an article to a special issue whose editors have repeatedly blown past their own deadlines. 🙄

I love that I do the kind of research where I have to define terms like “hashtag” and “meme,” but I hate trying to figure out how much of a 1,000-word conference proposal to dedicate to those definitions.

Sure I scheduled a research Skype meeting for Saturday morning, but I attended in my pajamas, so that still counts as work/life balance, right? 😂😭

I’m convinced that the hardest part of any research collaboration is figuring out what software everyone uses.

It’s amazing how much French I’m learning translating students’ tweets to English for a research project. Language is so rich, and limiting it to 280 characters arguably makes it more so.