Illness, return to work and yet more articles

Having been ill for the last ten days I returned to work yesterday and today have been back working on my masters. Frustrating to have such a long stint off but not in my control & I am quite pleased with what I have managed to achieve already since returning to the office.

I have found another 25plus articles in the last 24 hours, some of which are really excellent. In particular, it is encouraging to have found more articles on religiosity and internet use & also viral marketing - Word of Mouth (WOM) and electronic WOM (eWOM).

Having had some serious problems with the rate at which I could collect data for the samples I have found another suitable network to examine which is a more manageable size. This has allowed me to finish gathering the data overnight yesterday and today and so I finally have two complete networks which can be compared and studied. I am satisfied temporarily!!

My next task is to create a table showing all the data types that I have already and all than be collected and directly compared and contrasted. Obviously, the other main task is writing my Literature Review draft which is due end of February 2011. Please notice the deliberate mistake...

Progress, setbacks and large amounts of reading

Having had a good meeting with my supervisors yesterday, they are happy with how things are progressing and we have some exciting avenues to pursue with the data captured so far.

I had a bit of a setback yesterday when in the ninth hour of accessing the data source I made a mistake and caused the whole thing to fail! This has meant that I have started again from the beginning - frustrating, but not the end of the world. I am now six hours into the process again (being extremely careful not to make the same mistake twice) and hopfully should be done tonight/tomorrow.

Whilst my computer has been off periodically because of this accessing I have been doing a lot of reading. Today I read one of the most useful articles I have found so far: Twitter Power - tweets as electronic word of mouth, which covers lots of the areas I am; with similar tests planned and exposition of research in word of mouth, branding and viral marketing. I have also found a useful paper looking at religiosity affecting use of internet and social network sites in particular which is great for further references.

My aim for the day has been to finish the data aquisition and I'm not quite there but "you can't hurry [data], no you'll just have to wait, [data] don't come easy, its a game of give and take, no you can't hurry [data]..." etc. etc. Anyone reading this now thinks I'm mad unless you get the reference? Answers on a postcard please..

LR Update

Just a shortish one - another good day, despite less time to work on research today I have been able to find some more excellent articles. What I'm finding is that as I find things for one section of the LR it is leading to uncover things that are useful for other sections. For example, today when researching academic writing on microblogging, references to viral marketing came up. It is too simplistic to think - 'I will just write this section today' - it is much more fluid and cross-pollenating a process than that!!

I'm working on a spreadsheet as well to help visualised the cross-referencing between the papers that I am using so that I can easily find the papers that are more cited by others in the field and also guard against gaps in knowledge of the field of study. It takes a bit of time but now that I have it up and running the papers that I read from now on will be more easily added to it & it should make my life easier! I do need to sort out my account with Refwords so that doesn't become a headache as well in terms of the references. That reminds me - my account with VOSON (mentioned 2-3 posts back) has been granted so I can now go ahead with testing that alongside NodeXl next week.

Anyway, I'm now going to cook in time for the family coming to visit for the weekend. Won't be working tomorrow but have lots of reading to do - yay!