Ingmar Lippert's blog

I am spending two weeks focussing on writing up short accessible articles on two topics:

• Greenwashing: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Green Culture,
• Carbon Dioxiode: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste.

Finally, after a months of coding, and a couple of weeks of abstracting towards code families and themes, I decided about what to focus on as the core theme of my PhD: the social construction of carbon emissions.

As part of my ongoing STS ethnography, I am trying to narrow down the theme which I a(i)m to analyse in depth.
For analysis, I use TAMS. It's friendly developer, Matthew Weinstein, supported me already several times by implementing some of my requests.

Still new in the realm of research tools are social networking tools for researchers to connect. Academia.edu and Mendeley claim to offer new ways for researchers to find like-minded researchers, i.e. people with similar research interests.

During the last month I have been scanning field notes, covering two and a half months of field work, for all kinds of categories, emerging in the field. I came up with a huge map of codes and how they are linked. Of great help for this work was the TAMS Analyser, i.e. the software called "Text Analysis Markup System" available from http://tamsys.sourceforge.net/.

Finally it worked out: I negotiated access into a multinational corporation for undertaking my ethnographic research. The corporation is active in the financial services sector and one of the global players.
As it seems, I will have a chance to follow actors, actants and other objects as well as subjects for several months - in several countries. Let's see, whether this actually works out.

I will start empirical research in January 2009 in the south of Germany.