Academic Blogs Wiki

ISTM that that graph doesn’t show all that much decline of the blogosphere, but mainly a surprisingly rapid growth in tumblr (which may or may not actually continue as projected).

Also, I wonder why twitter didn’t make the graph.

It seems to me that blog readerships especially among academics have reproduced most of the dysfunctions of the profession as a whole. There is a rather homogeneous character to academic blogs that emanates from this. There are of course some blogs with very, very small readerships that have dissenting opinions. But, their readership is not any larger than could have been easily reached using much older technologies.

This is better, as it includes the terms.

J. Otto Pohl goes to Crooked Timber comments to protest that academic blogs don’t allow dissent. The Worm Ouroboros, meanwhile, continues to devour its own tail . . .

J.O.P.:

Defining “academic blogs” rather broadly and at least w/r/t blogs that deal w intl politics, it’s not true that there’s no diversity. I’d refer you, e.g., to the debate that took place around the Libya intervention and R2P, during which, for ex., an undergraduate, D. Trombly, could and did spar w/ an Anne-Marie Slaughter. Or what about the recent debate over J.Y. Kim? There is diversity, maybe not perfectly distributed across the spectrum, but it does exist.

Well maybe my blog is the smallest one in the world. But, it does not get hundreds of readers a month. I am guessing I have maybe six actual human readers and sending six letters out a month used to be affordable in the US during my youth. This is what I mean by very, very small readerships. I would classify an academic blog with hundreds of actual readers each month as very large and certainly not among those with opinions dissenting from mainstream academic orthodoxy.

I had been running it on a version of Mediawiki which was not (to put it mildly) optimized for anti-spam, with the result that I had to spend a few hours each week cleaning out the garbage. The transition to a new, more robust system has taken a little bit of time, but it is now up and running again.

Henry, I’m the community manager for MediaWiki. My sympathies on the trouble. Should I talk with Dan Cohen, Ammon Shepherd, you, or someone else to advise on antispam stuff? Short version: people report success if they install the QuestyCaptcha or Asirra add-ons to the ConfirmEdit extension.

One observation, perhaps obvious: academicblogs.org doesn’t appear to be accepting new registrants at the moment. This makes it hard to update the wiki.

The average academic journal article does not have hundreds of readers. Even a number of well cited monographs never get beyond a few thousand readers years after publication. So I think a couple hundred readers a day, and I think CT is actually in the thousands, is comparatively a very large audience. On the second point I will point out that on a comparative international level that Quiggin’s position looks quite prestigious from my vantage point. Just his position at a university in Australia alone gives him a huge perception advantage in North American and Europe over people like me. So position is all relative.

And my cyberspace friend, Professor Daniel Goldberg, has closed his blog: The Medical Humanities Blog (where I guest blogged for a time), although it is still listed as well.

That could very well be true, at least it helps makes sense of my affinity for the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self.”

Am I missing something here: Tumblr is a form of blogging, right? So Randall is essentially predicting that in October 2012, blogging will be overtaken in popularity by blogging.

If J. Otto Pohl posts something interesting on his blog, we can all see it, even if we hadn’t signed up to read his blog. That’s something that letters cannot do.

The rise of the academic tumblr cannot be far away.

Am I missing something here: Tumblr is a form of blogging, right? So Randall is essentially predicting that in October 2012, blogging will be overtaken in popularity by blogging.

The couple dozen tumblrs I’m familiar with are all pictures-only, but I guess probably not all tumblrs are pictures-only (?), so there’s some issue with figuring out how to sort the flickr-tumblr tumblrs that are just pictures from the part-of-the-blogosphere-tumblr tumblrs with text. (And I guess if you allow pictures-only sites to be part of ‘blogs’ then it would be vacuous, but for me blog = mostly-text-based stuff.) I’d go try to collect more concrete data on the proportions, but wayyyy too many tumblrs are NSFW, so trying to take a random sample at a coffee shop is not a good idea…

Henry, I only got the gig at the Wikimedia Foundation a year ago, so the opportunity cost is/was limited. :-) I’ve emailed Ammon with a useful link or three. Glad you were able to hand the logistical worries over to someplace more able to handle them. You might be pleased to know that programmers at the Wikimedia Foundation are hard at work at a visual editor to make writing and editing wiki pages far easier. (And a bunch of other stuff too but I figure the visual editor might lead to the largest sigh of anticipatory relief.)

Hmm, not only does the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason support your wiki, it also hosts work on Zotero, THATCamp, & more – cool!

John Q:

But, the reason you are able to reach an audience on this blog and be taken seriously is because of your position in Australian academia. Whereas nobody other than my family, a few friends, and an occasional former student from Turkmenistan reads my blog. Academic blogging reproduces the same hierarchies that exist in academia at large. That includes a predisposition by most blog readers to automatically give far more credence to scholars at universities in the US, Europe, and the white commonwealth over those at other places. No academics from the US, Canada, Australia, or Europe are ever going to read my blog and take my ideas seriously simply because I do not occupy a position of prestige in academia outside the Blogosphere.

John Quiggin 04.16.12 at 9:23 pm

” @Barry I answer to John Q (at home in Oz, where blogging professors are still pretty rare, I also go by Prof Q).”

I was actually making a bad joke (Simpsons reference).

J Otto, your figures were for articles or monographs, and I’d agree that many of them don’t get read much. A blog is the equivalent to a newsletter, and a blog with few updates would be equivalent to a weekly newsletter. Running a weekly (print) newsletter with 100 readers would be quite the chore.

J.O.Pohl:
Whereas nobody other than my family, a few friends, and an occasional former student from Turkmenistan reads my blog.

What you really mean is that no one but these people reads your blog regularly. There is a difference between regular and occasional reading of a blog (or anything else), which you seem determined not to understand.

Otto: There are counterexamples out there; for instance, Language Hat is a fairly influential linguistics blog with a large commentariat, whose author isn’t even in academia. I suspect that academic blogs are more likely to influence the discourse “indirectly” through interested non-specialist readers, rather than changing the minds of specialists with prior positions and knowledge of the literature. But building up such an audience takes work and a certain amount of showmanship; non-specialist audiences are a lot more demanding in terms of presentation and style than academic journals are.

I’ve been writing a blog writing on early medieval history, religion and gender for nearly seven years. For the vast majority of that time I didn’t have an academic position (and was indeed, technically pseudonymous), but I still gradually got other academics reading my blog. Others of my friends in similar positions have done the same thing and also got a positive reception.

Maybe medievalists are just more willing than some other historians to judge people’s work on their own merits rather than rely on credentials, but some of it is also about building an online and real-life community: commenting on and linking to related blogs, meetups with bloggers etc. Blogging about seminars/conferences I’ve attended is a very popular feature, for example. There’s an art to getting a mix of very specialist posts that intrigue other researchers and the more general posts that draw in people who work on vaguely related topics and want someone online to discuss things with.

As for J Otto Pohl, I’m afraid that anyone who announces on his blog how quickly he got his PhD, but not what field it was in and who doesn’t tag his posts (so a reader can see if a particular topic of interest is covered) is immediately alienating a lot of potential readers.