We are doing research, honest!

OK. So quite a few things have happened since I last posted on here.

I persuaded Ian to through caution to the wind and get some stuff written, so we began working on an Abstract at the beginning of term. We needed to consolidate our knowledge and decided what it was that we had to say about his game, and also, what we were going to do with the information. I did some peripheral reading of Lyons (2001) Surveillance Society and also found out that there is a Journal of Surveillance, which could yield some useful information. I also think there is more mileage to be gained from Foucault on this subject.

Sooooo, we looked for an upcoming conference, wrote an abstract and now.... we are going to give a poster presentation of our ideas at next years annual British Sociological Association Conference which, handily enough, is being held in Cardiff.

Arrgh though!! Neither of us has given a poster presentation before, so it's a bit daunting. I've been told it's nicer than giving a customary paper - in that it is less stressful - which will be good. Excited as we were by the news, the 'oh, so what do we do now?' kicked in quite quickly, so we managed to clear the decks for a couple of hours, met up for coffee last week and came up with a cunning plan. We went to have a look at some poster presentations that are already up in UWIC and now we have a much better idea of what it is that we need to do.

We also realise that we need to test some of our ideas. As the paper is about autonomy of users in a computer game, we need to be able to define autonomy and measure it among users. Therefore, we need to do a few key things:
1. develop the game more fully
2. conduct a pilot study of users of the game from which to draw data to inform this presentation
3. look into the ethics of researching users of this game

I am going to do some reading around the subjects of surveillance and autonomy, and Ian and I are going to meet up on the 6th of February 2009, to discuss setting up the pilot as the conference is the 17th of April - arrgh!