Edition blogging

Have the bibliographers and textual editors among us said anything about the blog-as-edition? We have Stoker blogging, Pepys blogging, Isaac D'Israeli blogging--and, I've just discovered, Thoreau blogging.  When the blog has comments enabled, the text becomes an interactive edition...a semi-wiki, if such a thing is possible.  Both "professional" and "amateur" readers can drop in, discuss the text, supply annotations, and so forth.  This informal approach to constructing an edition is much different than that employed by, say, Sheila Spector in her edition of Alroy--not least, from an academic reader's perspective, because bloggers appear to be reprinting editions in the public domain instead of collating multiple editions, going back to the original MSS, and the like.  I hasten to add that I'm not at all criticizing the informal method; it's producing its own collaborative reading and writing experience.  In a sense, this kind of blog project becomes a public reading group, with the readers producing the text as they discuss it.  But it does add a new wrinkle to the concept of an "edition." 

D'Israeli aside, the texts that so far seem most attractive for blog editions are, not surprisingly, journals and epistolary novels.  Someone out there must be planning the Clarissa blog, the Sir Charles Grandison blog, or perhaps the Dorothy Wordsworth blog.  (Please spare us all the My Secret Life blog.)  As someone who regularly teaches novels originally published in serial format, I'm interested in whether or not the posting schedule of these blogs affects how readers approach these texts.  Is the prospect of reading Pepys less nerve-wracking when approached day-by-day? Does reading Dracula entry-by-entry accentuate the novel's gothic elements?  Inquiring minds want to know.  Or have any minds inquired already?

Comments

[Clancy]

Megan McArdle had a project similar to what you're talking about going for a while, but the actual site is no longer available, unfortunately.

[Camicao]

Really, the Pepys diary/blog should enable comments so that Pepys can get comments back from his readers. And regarding Clancy's comment: perhaps the "Wayback Machine" can be used to find an archived copy of McArdle's project.

[Ruth]

Have you ever taught a serial novel as a serial? I'm not a Victorianist, so it would be a bit of an indulgence to do so (but OK with my department, thank god!); I keep thinking, though, of teaching a year in the life of some Victorian periodical: the novels (read in installments); the essay, the letters, the ads. I like context. I don't know if my students would. Anyone out there ever try this?

[Miriam]

I've occasionally come across descriptions of people teaching serial novels as serials--e.g., teaching multiple novels at once in the original installments. Grad students might like the journal exercise a bit more than undergrads, I suspect (unless you have very historically-minded undergrads...).

[Jeremy]

I had, rather superficially, given the topic some thought a while back. The Diaries of Franz Kafka sparked my curiosity. With the Kafka diary, its not so much that the reading is less nerve-wracking. The utility of it for me is that I'm seeing his thoughts and his writing more through a process than a "finished" diary. Given that I've already read Dracula, that blog might not have the same effect on me as the Kafka blog. I've been meaning to create a list of these blog diaries or edition blogs (which brings up another question: is there an appropriate term or terms for these publications?)

[Academic Coach]

re: serials

I just finished Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street which was written as a daily serial novel. At some points, he writes, he was only 3 days ahead of publication. Fascinating comments in the preface about how he found the medium different from his novels...

[Brett Holman]

Interesting! I hadn't heard of "edition blogs" before - as it happens I'm doing something similar-but-different called scareships, which is a database (with references, and eventually, scans of the primary sources) of certain events which took place in Edwardian Britain ("phantom airship" sightings), entered into and organised by the blog. Does anyone know of any other blogs like mine?