As I alluded to in the previous post, the latest bulletin board posting blitz has been quite successful so far. I’ve gotten at least a dozen people to email me back and we are on our way to getting an honest to goodness interview schedule going. Additionally, most of the people have been good about forwarding my request for interviewees to other people and to other mailing lists. In fact, the nice folks at Baseball Think Factory put up the announcement in one of their news blogs!  BTW, if you click on over you will find an amusing exchange in the comments section.  As if getting interview subjects wasn’t enough, most of the people have had kind words of encouragement for my research.  They’ve also directed me to a lot of good advice about conducting my research and resources that will be helpful in my research, i.e. the previous post on the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective was a result of one of these people sending me the link thinking it would be helpful.  It’s been a bit humbling actually.  I mean, I’m feel pretty knowledgeable about Sabermetrics, but I think pedagogically, we as researchers, often forget that we don’t nearly as much about the things we are studying, as the actual people we are studying.  I must say, I’m very encouraged by all of this.  Like most grad students, I’m a bit jaded and cynical about the nature of humans, but the response that I have gotten makes me hopeful that it is worthwhile to study other human beings.

Anyways, now I need to get to the business of getting things shored up for all of these interviews coming up this summer.  So, without further ado, here is to do list #2.

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If you look at the left sidebar and scroll down to below the archives, you’ll see that I’ve copyrighted this blog and all the documents linked to it under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Creative Commons License. What that means is that you are free to use the content of this blog, as long as you attribute the work to me, do not use for commercial purposes and do not change it in any way. On the surface, I feel like this is a small thing, but as someone who is publishing his academic research while it is being done, I think there are some real issues to go over here.

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For this project, there were several types of methodology that I have been considering. For now, I have settled on one main type of methodology and am still considering whether or not to add one additional component. In this post, I will talk about the methodology that will yield the bulk of the data that I will be analyzing. Before we start, I suppose that I should restate the main research questions that I have for this project.

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Hello Blogosphere! My name is Bob Ngo. I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Some of you may already know me from another blog that I maintain (and I use “maintain” in the loosest sense possible) on these here internets. Anyways, as you might guess by the title “PhD Candidate”, I am working on my dissertation on the Sabermetric movement in American Baseball, and I thought it might be a good idea to track the whole process with a blog. I’ve decided to use a blog for a number of reasons.

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