As I mentioned a couple of months ago, it’s been increasingly difficult for one person to keep up with changes in the academic blogosphere. Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time updating the blogroll, removing defunct blogs and what inaccuracies I could detect, and putting in new ones, to lay the foundations for a new, wikified version of the blogroll. The idea is that academics who want to add their own blogs or other academic blogs that they know of don’t need to hassle me; they can instead go and update the list themselves. The new site lives at “http://www.academicblogs.net”:http://www.academicblogs.net and “http://www.academicblogs.org”:http://www.academicblogs.org. I’m also encouraging people to add other kinds of content – descriptions of blogs, lists of blogs at a given university, and other such material that they or others might find useful (stuff which is obviously inappropriate or self-serving is a different matter, obviously). The site is on my own server space (which I hope won’t be overwhelmed by users); the “frequently asked questions list”:http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions provides a more comprehensive description of what the site is, how it works etc.
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Gideon 10.03.06 at 11:55 am
So why are the blogs about computational complexity and what would normally be labeled Computer Science not under “Sciences?”
And Information Technology isn’t generally used for anything except the bit of Computer Science that relates to system administration (at least in the U.S.) Call it Computational Science or Computer Science but not Information Technology, please.
Aidan Kehoe 10.03.06 at 12:17 pm
I disagree with Gideon. Don Knuth did computer science; there remain people who think about algorithms and essential properties of the machine and so on, but they’re a vanishing minority of the people in the field that still happens to be called Computer Science. The University of Edinburgh calls its department Informatics, following many other Western languages, and I think that’s a much better description. But Information Technology will do.
tod. 10.03.06 at 12:18 pm
As a member of a school of “Information and Computer Sciences,” I agree that there’s a difference between “Information Technology”, “Information Sciences” and “Informatics” and “Computer Science,” though I wouldn’t say that the use of the former terms is quite as limited at Gideon would have it. At least here, the IS people have under their purview the science of software engineering, the science of UI, and anything related to social aspects of computing.
Depending on how comprehensive this index becomes, it may be useful to have both an IT/IS category and a CS category.
I would have prefered to have moved this discussion to the wiki itself, but it isn’t loading for me. Mostly I get blank pages, but once in a while I see “Error in fetchObject(): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (111)” followed by a backtrace.
Aidan Kehoe 10.03.06 at 12:24 pm
Also, both sites are timing out for me. Reproduced from a German and an Irish IP address. I can ping the machine, and connect to port 80, but requesting the front page doesn’t give a response.
todd. 10.03.06 at 12:26 pm
Aidan Kehoe’s comment hadn’t appeared yet when I composed my first comment, or I would have mention that as well.
I think one expects to find subjects such as artificial intelligence, graphics, networking, security, machine learning, and programming languages, natural language processing, and computational modeling — as well as algorithmics and theory, which are certainly alive and well — under “computer science.”
During the process of researching and applying to graduate schools last year, I saw many more departments and shools of computer science than of informatics. At least in the US, that is definitely still the standard name of the field.
tom s. 10.03.06 at 12:29 pm
“So why are the blogs about computational complexity and what would normally be labeled Computer Science not under “Sciences?—
Because, of course, any subject with the word “Science” in the name is not one. And, equally of course, any discipline that ends in “omics” is not one either.
Not that I’m narrow minded about this or anything…
todd. 10.03.06 at 12:38 pm
Tom, we’ve been over this already.
(I generally post about three comments a year on this blog, and here I am at three in one post. I do apologize!)
Another Damned Medievalist 10.03.06 at 1:47 pm
Why is Araeology under science? All the archaeologists I know are Classical or Medieval historians … and anthropologists.
Baptiste 10.03.06 at 2:28 pm
What a great idea. A few weeks ago, a discussion on a famous French blog, versac ( http://vanb.typepad.com/versac/2006/09/blogs_acadmique.html ) toyed with the idea of a wiki…
Henry 10.03.06 at 2:32 pm
Gideon, adm – one of the reasons that I’m doing the wiki is because I’m probably not the best person to be making decisions on these issues. Can you take this over to the talk pages of the wiki, and if a consensus emerges or anything like it, I’ll implement it.
Baptiste – glad you like it. If you or someone else would like to put together an initial list of academic blogs in French, it would be wonderful (one of the things I was hoping people would do).
versac 10.03.06 at 3:19 pm
Henry : this is a very nice idea (I had the same, as baptiste said, for french academic blogs, as it has alreday been done fro french political blogs).
I think it could be a solution to work on french section on. Baptiste has started a wiki, already, on french academic blogs, and there are several lists in some places.
I wonder how we could introduce a french section : inside each category, or should there be another one ? I assume there are not as many blogs as english-speaking ones in many categories or sciences…
Henry 10.03.06 at 3:55 pm
I suspect the problems that many people are having are due to limited server capacity. If this continues I’ll have to figure out another option obviously – I’m using my own cheap server space at the moment.
versac – I’ve added a new category under ‘alternative orderings of blogs’ on the main page – ‘blogs by language,’ which links to a page that should be a master list of blogs in various languages. Click on the undefined ”Academic blogs in French” list to create a page. Also, if people want specific lists for particular disciplines, they can link to them under the “Internal Resources” heading for that particular discipline’s page. Finally, people can of course list blogs by university for particular French universities – if Baptiste has found over 30 bloggers at Paris 8, he should by all means feel free to list them on the appropriate page.
James 10.03.06 at 4:39 pm
Thanks for a very useful resource. If I could figure out how to do it, I will add the links to my own site (I’m rubbish at computers)
RJO 10.03.06 at 6:04 pm
If we have “Those belonging to the Emperor” shouldn’t we also have “Those that from a long way off look like flies”?
Jacob T. Levy 10.03.06 at 6:34 pm
Thanks for the public service, Henry. Got a big laugh of “those belonging to the emperor” as a category.
the cubist 10.04.06 at 12:33 am
“Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time updating the blogroll, removing defunct blogs and what inaccuracies I could detect, and putting in new ones…”
A worthy project overall. But this aspiration toward putting in new innaccuracies — Beckett might have called it a pithy summary of the academic method…;)
Eszter 10.04.06 at 3:23 am
Thanks so much for this wonderful resource!
Nicolas Quiroga 10.04.06 at 9:48 am
Good idea. I discuss this in .
Henry 10.04.06 at 2:37 pm
Beckett might have called it a pithy summary of the academic method
Ah, indeed. Or “Janice Rogers Brown.”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/04/happy-days/
By coincidence I was at the touring Gate production of Godot last night. Very good indeed.
Thanks Jacob – the category name was picked because I was more or less at a loss to come up with something that grouped together the otherwise-uncategorizables.
bitchphd 10.05.06 at 3:16 pm
Henry, thanks so much for all the tedious hard work.
rabbit 10.08.06 at 10:54 am
Why does Henry Farrell hate art history?
rabbit 10.08.06 at 11:04 am
Just in case your response is that there ARE no art history blogs, Blogshares lists 31 blogs in the “Art History” industry. And hey, I could add them, but there is no place to put them.
Henry 10.08.06 at 11:33 am
Let me refer you to the front page of the wiki which links to a _Talk Page_ which is where you make requests of this sort. It isn’t rocket science. If they are actual academic blogs they can go in – but there is really no need for silly snark. Just for actually devoting some attention to how the bloody thing works.
rabbit 10.08.06 at 12:11 pm
I thought I was just being lighthearted. Lots of commentators here were talking about fields; sorry I didn’t know the rules.
Henry 10.08.06 at 2:59 pm
Ok – fair enough, sometimes jokes don’t translate as well on the internets (and I’ve been dealing over the last 24 hours with some genuinely bizarre criticisms of the enterprise as an exercise in intellectual hegemony, so I’m likely a bit touchier than I should be).
rabbit 10.08.06 at 4:40 pm
I can only imagine — and I should be well aware that humor doesn’t translate in this context. Anyway, thanks for doing this.
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