The metablogging continues

Of the responses to a recent talk she delivered about blogging, Rohan Maitzen comments that "[m]aybe people were taking for granted that blogging could be beneficial in the ways I was describing and so didn’t need to ask about it, but the impression I got (perhaps unfairly) was that they couldn’t quite imagine those benefits trumping the low likelihood of professional rewards for the time spent."  Concrete "rewards" from blogging tend to be, at best, random: the CoHE buys one of your blog posts; somebody invites you to a conference; you're asked to review books; somebody takes one of your posts and quotes it in a book¹.  "Communication," as Rohan suggests, seems to be a better way of thinking about what academic bloggers do when they write about their scholarly work and lives.  Not simply the results of one's research, but also how that research interfaces with teaching, with family life--even, I suppose, with one's cat developing an aggravating taste for rare leatherbound Victorian periodicals.  I don't want to trot out the word "relatable," if only because legions of students will consign me to the Eighth Circle for hypocrisy, but perhaps "demystifying" will do.  Even if the demystification involves revealing that some academics spend an awful lot of time reading rather unreadable Victorian fiction, because sometimes, that's just what you have to do in order to responsibly achieve your scholarly goals...

A different question might be: is the communication heard or overheard, to borrow from John Stuart Mill? Much of my writing about Victorian religious fiction, for example, is primarily for my own benefit--in effect, I'm using the blog as a repository of notes to myself about particular texts, some of which I'll plunder later for more formal writing.  I'm dubious about the use of a blog as an alternative site for peer review (see "random," above), unless one has publicity mechanisms in place to ensure that the most useful readers show up; there's a reason that this little article, for which I wanted peer review (and not in the "jump-through-hoops" way), started out as a deleted blog post.  (Among other things, it's not at all in this blog's usual niche.)  That being said, I've found that blogging has been most valuable in reshaping my academic prose--more relaxed, less Englishese (although I have to discipline my habit of indulging in parentheticals like, er, this one).  I don't think that Book Two is about to rival Dan Brown or Stephen King in sales any time soon, assuming that its contract goes through (my apologies to the publisher...), but I also don't think you need to be a certified English professor in order to read it, either. 

¹ Which is why I finally broke down and listed TLP on my CV, under "other publications":  there's no point in continuing to erase the existence of a blog that's being cited in scholarly works! 

Comments

[jseliger.com]

somebody takes one of your posts and quotes it in a book.

This is pretty rare among peer-reviewed essays too, which is Mark Bauerlein's point in The Research Bust.