Blogscholars?

I share Unfogged's puzzlement. The-blog-as-scholarship question has come up now and again in the blogosphere, and I've been more convinced by the "nays" than the "yeas." You can certainly make a good case for blogging as an updated version of the epistolary and social networks built by scholars in the early modern period, of the sort studied by Anne Goldgar, but one node in a community does not a work of scholarship make. Like academic listservs, academic blogs are conducive to conversation--dialogue about this point or that--but, really, are they good for developing extensive and in-depth arguments on significant topics? A blogger without reasonably frequent posts is a blogger without readers, as a general rule, and "extensive and in-depth arguments" can hardly be posted frequently (or, if frequently, not well). It's true that some bloggers manage to do the first phases of scholarship on their blog--throwing out ideas, talking about them with like-minded folks, and so forth--but such activities in and of themselves are the building-blocks of intellectual life in general. There are a number of academic bloggers who do an excellent job of talking about their scholarship, but that again is not in and of itself "scholarly activity": it's like writing an abstract for a book or conference paper. And, as Matt Weiner points out in Unfogged's comments, there's nobody to stop you from blogging something inane or just plain wrong (although there are plenty of people out there who, after the fact, will gladly point out that you've done so). That said, there are a number of bloggers out there who could probably claim credit for their blogs as service credit (e.g., running a blog dedicated to the activities of a professional society) or teaching credit (e.g., developing a group blog for classroom use). But blogging's appeal--the ability to post "to the moment," to write informally and without the intervention of an editor, to interact immediately with an audience, and so forth--seems, if anything, to militate against the kind of ongoing work (and, quite frankly, real drudgery) involved in scholarship. You can get instant gratification from a blog post, but not from that article on Emily Sarah Holt you've been writing for the past two years.

UPDATE: The terms of this discussion--"scholarship," "scholarly activity," etc.--should be understood in their purely professional sense, not their more general sense. "Thinking out loud," after all, is part of the scholarly enterprise, but you don't list it on your annual report. (Updated in response to this thoughtful response.)

Comments

[Amardeep]

I agree with you in spirit regarding the limits and possibilities of blogging as serious academic work. I especially agree that at present, one should think of it as a *legitimate* context, but one which is not by itself sufficient.

But I think there are two possible ways to see scholarship-on-the-internet go forward. One is to keep in mind that there are different kinds of literary scholarship. People who study contemporary world (or postcolonial) literature find that a good deal of their work actually consists of tracking down what is happening in the literary scenes in different parts of the world.

It is a different kind of work, at least initially, than historical scholarship. Perhaps we could say it's "gathering" rather than "delving." Of course in order to push the academic conversation forward, another kind of work -- which goes beyond gathering -- is required.

Ultimately, something like the formal context of the academic journal will remain necessary for serious scholarship to survive. But academic journals might come to be published differently as the digital revolution continues. Journals will never be blogs, but perhaps they will be published more like highly-specialized newsletters in the future.

Even now, I often wish that there was some way of being informed when a journal I don't normally look at publishes an essay on a topic that is of interest to me... And often benchmark journals like PMLA will only have a single essay that is of interest to me in a given issue. The rest of the paper is, frankly, wasted on me.

So maybe journals are headed the way of RSS, if not blogs per se.

[Ray Davis]

Journals should certainly be online, with (refereed, if possible) comments threads attached for peer response. Moreover, there's no need to delay finished articles while the editors wait for (or induce) an issue's (or double or triple issue's) worth of material. And naturally there should be a front page to the online journal that shows recent additions and changes, and an RSS feed.

Whether you call the ensuing instituionally sponsored product a "blog" or not is up to you. Me, I would call it a well-run journal.

Whether you call blogs scholarship depends, as you say, on what you call scholarship. I'd add it also depends on what you call blogs. I sometimes labor over and research pieces for months (part-time, admittedly) before posting anything, which seems to go against some of your assumptions. I'm not a professional scholar, but I would imagine that professional scholars exist who would prefer the blog's free form, particularly the ability to post short observations and findings *as* short observations and findings.