Comments on: Scholarbloggers and kettlechoppers

By: RS

RS — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 20:31:11 +0000

Can you imagine how much blog-like follow up comments would multiply the time taken to read every article?

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 20:22:37 +0000

I’ve pointed to B&BS in the past as an indicator of how blogging might evolve into a cheaper, faster, more public academic review process. “Long-winded, redundant and self-obsessed” sounds like a pretty good blog description to me.

By: RS

RS — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 10:51:18 +0000

The BMJ rapid responses acts as this sort of model, where responses to an article can be published online very quickly (24hrs – only vetted for obscenity and libel) – although I think it treads a fine line between facilitating scholarly debate and givng credibility to the objections of fringe loons. The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences publishes target articles followed by extensive invited open peer commentary – this often opens up the kind of debate that goes on behind closed doors in the Academy, but can also be long-winded, redundant and self-obsessed.

By: Amardeep

Amardeep — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 03:18:39 +0000

Amidst the seemingly never-ending anxiety that academic bloggers feel about the time they (we) waste doing our brilliant feuilletonist blogging, the concern is almost always something to the effect of “does this count? how can I make this count?” But the burning desire (quickly extinguished by the realists amongst and within us) to make blogs count as scholarship occludes a more interesting question, which we could be asking, namely: how to make scholarship more like the blogosphere? How about a journal which requires comments, and where every possible reference point is hyperlinked/verified? To make it more scholarly, it might need to limit itself to just one article per issue (i.e., one per month). And each article would need to be ‘peer reviewed’ (though how one defines ones “peers” is an inevitable problem). This model shares a good deal with the Wiki idea mentioned above. It is potentially a actually much harder thing to write for than a journal. So: Anyone want to start a bloggy, peer-reviewed, “scholarly” journal?

By: jholbo

jholbo — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 02:20:19 +0000

Hi, all. Sorry I was a bit unclear. When I suggest someone ought to get academic credit for blogging, all I really mean is that someone who does something like what Brian Weatherson does at TAR - truly dedicated academic blogging – should be recognized as doing something that is perfectly legitimate. A bit like publication, a bit like editing, a bit like organizing a small conference. So of course give it a spot of service credit. I didn’t mean that you should pack your CV with blog posts. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Scott, I don’t think I misunderstood the point of your essay, I just wrote unclearly. ‘Scholarship dragging down the tone of blogging’ was meant to indicate, in somewhat paradoxical terms, bureaucratic requirements (scholarship as we know it) just ensnaring something that is pleasantly free of that at the moment.

By: Cheryl Rofer

Cheryl Rofer — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 01:41:46 +0000

On the one side, I have seen academic cv’s that included everything up to having been a crossing guard in sixth grade. CV’s could be padded still further with every blog post and comment. This may not be a positive. On the other side, blogs could encourage clearer writing in the academy. Commenters can puncture a windbag. Bloggers might even habituate to writing so others can read, and the habit might carry over to their books and journals.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:56:29 +0000

If my blog became an accredited form of scholarship either: (a) I would get scholarly credit for a ridiculous post comparing referees of philosophical papers to football referees or (b) I would have to stop making ridiculous posts comparing etc. Both outcomes, I think, would be highly unsatisfactory. I also might feel obliged to post regularly, which would be disastrous as you’ll see if you click through. I might be interested in getting credit for some of my more substantive posts, but only of the same sort of credit I’d get for a self-published, non-reviewed thing—if it turns out to be cool, maybe it’ll have some impact. And, allowing comments on my blog as I do, I’m not absolutely positive that “without allowing comments from the readers” in Mr. Proyect’s comment isn’t redundant.

By: djw

djw — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:09:36 +0000

Jesus Christ, I’m an idiot.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:01:14 +0000

Jonathan, I think Mr. Gaiman’s library also contains a copy. Let me just disagree with Kingsley Amis. I’m not going to defend the article in question any more than I’m going to read it… Oh, I highly recommend reading it.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 20:41:03 +0000

You get the Dixon article via Uqbar-Stor.

By: Richard Cownie

Richard Cownie — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 20:31:27 +0000

“The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485,” by James Dixon. Actually that one sounds pretty interesting to me, even as a layman: given that Columbus sailed in 1492, I’d be fascinated to find out whether ship design was the enabling factor.

By: Richard Cownie

Richard Cownie — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 20:13:47 +0000

Surely blogging is most likely to replace or enhance the “let’s go have a drink” part of the academic experience, rather than the “here’s my research” part ? I would expect the ultimate outcome is that more ideas can be informally thrashed out and shared between geographically separated groups of people, producing better research more quickly, but that research will end up as conventional papers and articles, albeit probably with more collaborative and co-authored papers than has usually been the case in the humanities. Valuing the individual contributions to those collaborative efforts may be a challenge, but that’s a problem which other fields (e.g. physics) already deal with.

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 20:06:09 +0000

Ah, Pangur—brings back memories of an old friend, who performed Barber’s version. …and yes, if you are reinforcing the point, the predatory/competitive aspect of scholarship seems biggest hindrance to best possibilities of academic blogging.

By: Jasper Milvain

Jasper Milvain — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 19:53:18 +0000

The idea of scholarship as predation belongs to a Medieval Irish poet. And his cat, of course. (I got an internal server error, so this may be a repost. If so, apologies.)

By: Jasper Milvain

Jasper Milvain — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 19:49:58 +0000

The idea of scholarship as predation belongs to a Medieval Irish poet. And his cat, of course.