Academic blogs link-begging

by Henry Farrell on February 23, 2007

I’m pretty happy with how the “Academic Blogs wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.net that I started last September is working out. From a selfish point of view, it’s relieved me of the responsibility of manually updating the list (I do keep a regular eye on it to weed out spam etc). But more importantly, it provides serious coverage of parts of the academic blogosphere that I personally don’t have a clue about. CF for example the burgeoning list of blogs in “religion and theology”:http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Religion/Theology ; also the “list”:http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Blogs_by_Language of blogs in French, German, Danish etc. All this said, I’d like the list to be even more comprehensive than it is. The only way to do this is to get the word out, so I’m politely asking people who like the general idea of this resource to consider linking to it, in a post, in their blogroll, or (ideally) in both. The more people know about the wiki, the more people are likely to enter in details of academic blogs that they write themselves, or read. What I’d like to do in a few months is use the information in the wiki as the initial basis for a rough census of the academic blogosphere; who is blogging in what disciplines, at what stage of their careers and so on. I think this would make for pretty interesting reading, and the more comprehensive the wiki is as a map of the academic blogosphere, the more accurate the census will be.

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reqfd.net / sailing beyond a sunset
02.28.07 at 1:28 am

{ 10 comments }

1

Baptiste 02.23.07 at 6:19 pm

The academic “blogosphère” is exploding in France. Three years ago, when I was looking for French sociology blogs, I found only one ( http://coulmont.com/blog/2003/07/09/blogs-et-sociologie/ ).
Today, French sociologists — and intellectuels — seem to be courted by the mainstream press : some newspapers and magazines have installed blogging platforms on their websites http://lemonde.fr and http://nouvelobs.com (see phnk )
It may be a short term explosion…

2

bi 02.23.07 at 7:00 pm

What, is there no mention of the upcoming blogwars as prophesied by Adam Kotsko?

3

Kelly 02.23.07 at 7:23 pm

I keep thinking of adding a few blogs that I read (and admittedly, write for) to the list, but deciding where to stick bioethics is just a headache. Given that there seem to be some in several categories, what chance would there be of having a parent category for bioethics added?

4

Henry 02.23.07 at 8:12 pm

kelly – the rule of thumb I use here is that if a discipline has a significant number of departments specializing in it (say eight or nine), I add it to the parent tree; if not, it should go under a specific discipline. I recognize that bioethics, if it doesn’t qualify under that rule, is in an awkward position – I might perhaps create a new parent category for ’emerging fields’ or the like, which would include it.

5

bruce 02.23.07 at 9:20 pm

Fantastic resource, what would really help though is a few details in the listing so you don’t have to open every page to find something in a certain sub-field.

6

Kelly 02.23.07 at 9:27 pm

Henry – went ahead and emailed you offline. ;)

7

Henry 02.23.07 at 9:54 pm

Hi Bruce

I’m sort of hoping that people like you will add this level of detail (not being familiar with the subfields in many disciplines myself …)

8

Eszter 02.24.07 at 5:42 pm

One of my students will be requesting responses to a survey on academic blogging soon, if you hear from her – Gina Walejko – please respond!

Henry, thanks for all the work you’ve put into this very helpful resource!

9

Lord Acton 02.25.07 at 3:17 am

Henry:

Does it bother you that 70% of IR faculty self
identify themselves as Liberal? Which, in real
world terms, since they compare themselves
against their peers, that the actual figure
is probably over 90%?

Doesn’t that skew the results?

Or do you think that over 70% of people in the
“real world” self-identify themselves as
liberal?

10

Tim Lacy 02.27.07 at 7:24 pm

Henry: I discovered your wiki site via Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, and went ahead and added two blogs. It looks like a great resource, so I added a link to its “History” category at my web main blog, History And Education. – Tim

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