BROG is the acronym for (We)blog Research on Genre, a project based in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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The BROG project is an informal research collaboration dedicated to the conduct of empirical, social science research on weblogs. Founded and directed by Susan Herring, a professor of Information Science at Indiana University and established researcher of computer-mediated communication, its past and present members include faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars at Indiana University.
BROG is best known for an article published in January 2004 entitled, "Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs", which applied content analysis methods to a random sample of 203 blogs and characterized blogs as an emergent genre of computer-mediated communication. This article received the 2004 "Best Blogged Paper" Edublog award and is often cited in scholarship about blogs. A Google Scholar search indicates that it had been cited 677 times as of March 3, 2012. Brog is also a family name derived from the Scandinavian word which translates in English as "flag." About the year 1500 there was a famine in Sweden and an entire village migrated from Sweden to the Berner Oberland in Switzerland. During the early part of the twentieth century, family members emigrated to southern Wisconsin; from there one branch to Wyoming/Utah/Idaho and another branch remained in southwest Wisconsin. Brog families originated in other parts of Europe, perhaps with longer names that were diminished to the shorter form. The author of this segment visited Canton Bern in 2014 and there were no known Brogs still residing in Switzerland at that time. The author's great grandson is the sixth generation of only sons.
History
BROG was founded in February 2003 for the purpose of conducting a genre analysis of blogs at a time when very little research on blogs was available. The project's findings were first presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Toronto in October 2003. Since then BROG has expanded its focus to include research on gender, visual design, audience, and interconnectivity of weblogs. Since 2004, the project has made extensive use of Social Network Analysis methods and network visualizations.
Controversy
The presentation of BROG's research at the 2003 AoIR conference generated controversy among some bloggers who were present at the conference and others who were not about whether people who were "not bloggers" (two of the four original BROG members kept blogs at the time) could legitimately conduct research on blogs. Concerns were also expressed by some bloggers about the research's empirical, quantitative approach. Some critics expressed the view that this approach (which showed blogs to be less interlinked and conversational than was popularly believed) missed important aspects of the blogging experience.