On first looking into sixteen years of blog archives

Some months back, I began to think about moving the blog over to Wordpress, where it would become part of a professional site independent of my college homepage.  I soon rethought my thinking, as it were, because the blog has accrued a few scholarly citations over the years (in large part thanks to "Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels"), and it would inconvenience a number of other people if their footnotes were to suddenly go--to use an advanced term--kaflooey.  However, although I decided to leave the blog in its current spot, I also decided that it was time to give the archives a severe going-over.  I've always been upfront about considering blog posts to be the equivalent of rough drafts and works-in-process, and one of the things that a writer eventually has to do with a rough draft is edit it.  In the end, after making multiple backups of the entire blog, I deleted about nine hundred posts--

OUTRAGED READER: Nine hundred posts!!! You monster!!!

--which leaves about twenty-six hundred posts still up.

OUTRAGED READER: ...ah.

In a nutshell, this is what I learned from rereading sixteen years of my blog:

1) Early academic blogging was Twitter.  There was no pre-Twitter Eden of Profound Academic Prose, from which we fell into Superficial Tweets after eating the apple from the Tree of Social Media.  Beyond the endless listicles, memes, pets, and YouTube video links, there were a lot of conversations across blogs that were delivered in posts that, in retrospect, sure look tweet-length.  Twitter helped do in academic blogging because most academic blogs (this one included) lost most of their material.  Moreover, academics have other outlets for longform writing, like Medium.  

2) A lot of urgent kerfuffles proved ephemeral.  I came across blog posts on Some Issues of Great Import and...couldn't remember why on earth I wrote them.  Nobody reads these posts (trust me, I can check my stats).  Nobody else remembers these people or these topics.  

3) The links, they have rotted.  So many dead links.  So many.  We're talking posts that are the equivalent of the walking dead.

4) While you could make a case that individual posts might belong in a tenure file, you couldn't do the same for the whole blog.  Out of everything I've written on this blog, there are perhaps two or three posts that have had a real academic afterlife.  But again, even my most serious posts are still nothing more than rough drafts, nowhere near publication-worthy.  They're just rough drafts that happen to be out in public.

So what did I delete?

1) Memes, listicles, and "linking about" posts (the last because of #3).  

2) Just about everything that was the length of a tweet, including almost all of the "news" posts (we don't need to know about a then-new and probably now non-existent web resource twelve years on).

3) Video links.

These first three categories accounted for the bulk of my deletions.  Then:

4) Anything I felt was superficial (e.g., book or film posts that, in retrospect, didn't say much of anything), irrelevant (parodies that had lost their targets, discussions of classroom technologies no longer in use, the umpteenth complaint about long-gone Chronicle of Higher Education columns, etc.), incomprehensible (to me!), or just bad.

What did I keep?

1) Just about everything under "books" and "religion" in the archive stuck around.

2) There are some now-dated posts that I decided might still be useful to younger scholars because they discussed research as a process--problems you encounter, questions that get raised as you go along, practical issues, and so on.  I also kept a number of older posts about issues in the profession that I think are still germane beyond their original occasion.  

3) I kept the year-end reading roundups, because people seem to enjoy them, and, despite the dud links, the Halloween posts (it's often possible to find the titles elsewhere).

4) The parodies that still make sense.

5) I've fallen behind on the acquisitions posts, but I've been told that people find them helpful, so I kept the category.  

6) It's the Internet, so the cats aren't going anywhere.  

Comments

[Rohan]

You say that because your blog posts are "nowhere near publication-worthy" they don't deserve a place in a tenure file, and that the blog as a whole also does not. But was the argument for blogs "counting" in some way towards tenure ever that individual posts (or a whole blog) should reach published-article perfection to be included as part of an overall tenure portfolio? A blog is a different kind of communication, including and about scholarship. It creates or responds to conversations; it shares ideas and information; it personalizes scholarship; it chronicles work in progress; etc. The case (perhaps it failed, or perhaps you never agreed with it) was that this kind of public work had its own kind of value, wasn't it?

[Miriam]

I think I've always been quite skeptical about this blog in relation to promotion and tenure, but we don't have a "public engagement" section in our APT document. So I could see blogging being tenure- and promotion-worthy at an institution that had that as part of their evaluative criteria, yes.

[Kaleberg]

I'm not sure if you have done a great service to future scholars or not. You wade through enough obscure novels and the like to appreciate an author who does some pruning. On the other hand, I'm sure historians of the early internet would love to follow the evolution of the academic blog and explore its reactions to the advent of Twitter, Facebook and whatever new horror awaits us.

Please, don't tell me that you have deleted your real life paper writing text adventure.