If I were a reporter, I'd be fired...

...because there's some exciting news that I haven't shared with you yet, and I've known about it for two whole days! No excuse. Fired!

So, on the off chance that anyone here has not yet heard, Jocelyn is doing a research project on knitting. She's created a survey to help her learn about the "intersection of personal identity and knitting."* Cool, huh?

Haven't you ever wondered what it means to be a Knitter? Why it matters to us whether or not we knit? What it means to be part of a knitting community?

Well. Jocelyn is one of those people that knows how to do humanities research, and she'd like to tell us. As a scientist, I find that task just a little bewildering. What? Unknowns? With people? How do you control for all these variables? Watch out for experimental bias! Oh no...subjectivity! Ack!

Ahem. Give me a beaker and some chemicals any day...it's much easier than figuring out how to quantify what goes on in someone else's head. I barely know what goes on in my own head most days...

But anyway. That was a side note.

Bottom line: you should go tell Jocelyn about your knitting. She will take all our stories and put them together to figure out what they mean about Knitters and the way we communicate with each other and how we share our craft with one another. This isn't an opinion poll; it's a real research project that will help her to find out what it is that makes knitters tick. (Or click, I suppose. Click, click, click, clickety-click....)

I can't tell you how excited I am about all the things that we'll learn from this project, in a very geeky and serious research-y kind of way. There are about a million interesting directions to head with this project, and all of it depends on getting you to spend 20-30 minutes playing expert. And who doesn't love to talk about their knitting?

Here's that link again. You know you want to.


*There's more to it than that, but you'll have to go to her blog to read about it. She'll tell it better than I will...bad reporter!