The Little Professor

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.  

Is blogging "scholarship"? Redux redux etc. etc.

The question has returned from the dead yet again.  At this point, I am tempted to suggest that the answer is "blogging is scholarship whenever an academic reader decides that it is"; some of my blog posts have found their way into the footnotes of peer-reviewed publications, for example, and one of them was even the partial topic of a conference paper last summer (!), so...presumably they have "become" scholarly, despite their conspicuous lack of peer review? Or does online readership count as open source peer review? In any event, under the circumstances, it seemed silly to leave the blog entirely off my CV, so I stuck it under "Miscellaneous Writing."  (It's not this thing, it's that thing, it's...some other thing.)

At most, I think of my scholarly posts as drafts-in-public--or, if you like, as performances of scholarly process.  In that sense, they're "scholarship," but they aren't "scholarship" in the sense of "does my university 'count' this as scholarship when I apply for a merit bonus."  (Which makes me wonder if by "scholarship" we mean "what my university counts as such on an annual report.")  For example, I've done a couple of Bronte-related posts over the past few weeks, which relate directly to the article I'm working on (and, um, am supposed to be finished with by now).  But the article doesn't simply repackage the blog posts--if anything, what once occupied an entire and reasonably substantial post now boils down to a few entirely-revised sentences.  Similarly, Book Two draws on some material I posted on Scott, but the material in the book bears not much resemblance to the original blog post, aside from working from the same quotation.  There's certainly an argument to be made that drafting in public serves a useful function beyond any feedback, but the results are still only the first stage of what I would consider a finished product.  

(Un)intentional scholarship

Building on the work of Lee Shulman, Mark Sample defines scholarship thus: "a creative or intellectual act becomes scholarship when it is public and circulates in a community of peers that evaluates and builds upon it."  Sample is trying to articulate the boundary between service and scholarship, specifically as it relates to the digital humanities (where, as in the immediate case of Sean Takats, scholarly work may well look like service to academics not in that line of endeavor).  What intrigues me about this definition is that there is no intentionality about the "creative or intellectual act" in question--that is, an act not intended to function as "scholarship" may well become scholarship if Sample's criteria are met (although he is clearly discussing DH scholars who define their work as scholarship from the get-go).  In effect, scholarship becomes such at the point of reception and circulation.  Obviously, this definition separates scholarship from the various modes of its production and distribution, which is a key part of Sample's point.  However, it also suggests that the academic community may creatively appropriate, as it were, certain "creative or intellectual" products, no matter what the medium or the intent, and then incorporate them into scholarly discourse--whether or not the original author/coder/whatever may have anticipated entering into such discussions.

Sample's definition speaks to blogging, I think, because academic bloggers have long been mumbling away at the problem of how to categorize their practice.  Is it service (because you're engaging in a form of academic PR work?)? Is it scholarship (because you're actively discussing your work in a public forum?)? Is it teaching (because you may, in fact, be conducting curricular activities on the blog, analyzing pedagogical best practices, etc.)?  But if we focus on "what does the academic community do with your work?" then the blogger's intentions no longer matter very much at all.  This post, for example, was not intended to be a serious scholarly contribution,  although it certainly articulates, in sardonic form, some serious observations about neo-Victorian fiction (in particular, its frequent faux progressivism--Rules #2-#4 especially).  And yet...it has worked its way into books and articles on neo-Victorian fiction, which, using Sample's definition, would make it "scholarly." 

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! 

Here or there

I've been writing some version of this blog for about a decade (it originated on Blogspot), and so Dr. Crazy's questions did strike a nerve.  It was always my intention to write an academic blog, and not a political blog, a personal-life blog, a travel blog, or anything else of the sort. In my case, that meant de-anonymizing fairly early on: it's very difficult to anonymously write about your research when the research in question occupies the nichiest niche that ever niched.  (Religion and literature: big business.  Nineteenth-century non-canonical religious fiction, with occasional visits by poetry: let me introduce you to all ten of us.  In the known world.  Quite possibly the galaxy.)  Moreover, when I started, I was a non-tenured sort of academic.  Then I mutated into a tenured sort of academic.  And now I'm at the point of thinking about applying for promotion to full professor.  Does this affect blogging?

Yes and no.  This school year has seen the blogging slow down considerably, thanks to the trials and travails of revising Book Two; I imagine it will pick up again once I can get my new project(s) under way.  But more than that, going up the academic ladder means...I've accrued commitments that are not a weblog.  Even though I hardly qualify as an academic "star"--more of an academic streetlight, maybe, or perhaps a nightlight--I'm at that point in my career where people ask me to do things, whether it be referreeing a manuscript, writing an article, or sitting on Committee #3921.  (As I recall, a previous chair's congratulations on my tenure application included the line, "And now, I have a committee I need you to be on.")   At the same time, there are also fewer subjects that I can write about, in large part because I'm not anonymous; some of the strangest/most frustrating/most aggravating experiences I've had as an instructor or graduate director just can't put in an appearance here, because there's no safe way to keep other parties nameless.  Too, some things I might have once posted here are now over on Facebook or Twitter.

Still, Twitter is hardly a substitute for a long-form blog post when it comes to writing up the latest Victorian novel about baptism.  Although it might be fun to live-tweet a religious novel, come to think of it...         

Authorial intent

Last night, Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt asked me if I listed this blog on my CV.  Well, no, I responded.  Leaving to one side the occasional guest appearances by cats, annoyed Vulcan captains, and GLADOS, I've never considered anything I've written here to be more than notes towards a final scholarly product.    As I pointed out here, for example, a post on Walter Scott's The Monastery had to be entirely revised, reworked, and just re-ed in general before it could function in the context of my book chapter.  My blog prose tends to drown in parentheticals, qualifiers, and other stylistic tics that require stern discipline; moreover, I frequently...ah...express my opinion of certain texts more strenuously than is generally considered appropriate in academic discourse.  If I ever get around to writing an article about Florence; Or, the Aspirant (because, believe it or not, it does have literary-historical interest, if your literary-historical interests run to my kind of thing),  it's highly unlikely that I will spend the entire essay bewailing my plight.  Granted, one's tolerance becomes strained after spending too much time with angelic evangelical children who address other characters as "Mr. Jew," but articles are not the place to gnash one's teeth over a self-inflicted burden.  That's what you use blogs for, no? 

But this judgment call is getting a little tricky, because some of my blog posts are now showing up as citations in scholarly journals.  In particular, the Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels, which have even put in an appearance on someone's syllabus.  Obviously, being cited is a Good Thing (and looks nice on one's annual report), but...if I'm going to note that my post is turning up in the scholarly literature, does that mean that I should also note the blog as well? Even with cats, annoyed Vulcan captains, and Glados?

Take blog post, add water

Among other things, the (eternally) ongoing introduction to Book Two lays out why evangelical novelists adopted the historical novel but wound up repudiating Sir Walter Scott--and why Catholic novelists, by contrast, found Scott's example far more palatable.  Early on, I decided that the most logical way of approaching this subject was to show readers how Scott worked with a pet evangelical motif: a variant on Augustine's Tolle, lege.  Evangelical historical novels about the Reformation almost always dramatize the protagonist's very first encounter with a vernacular Bible; Scott, as it happens, does the same thing in The Monastery (1820), his novel about the Scottish Reformation. 

Amazing! Didn't I write a blog post on that very subject?  Why, yes, I did.  I'll just take that blog post and...

...throw it out.  Well, except for the long quotation.  (This being me, I'm of course writing about a Scott novel that most people go miles out of their way to avoid.) 

To be more precise, although I've kept several basic points (e.g., Scott's implicit critique of private judgement, his interest in tradition, his rejection of the evangelical "godly child"), I've had to reword or recontextualize all of them.  In fact, looking back at the original post, what strikes me is that I didn't spend any time discussing the most bizarre thing about Mary Avenel's introduction to the Bible: Scott's actual take on the Tolle, lege.  Mary, in a moment of despair, admits that she's in need of divine assistance but has no way of speaking to God.  And so the White Lady of Avenel rides to Mary's rescue, even though the spirit in question admits that she's exiled from the path of righteousness ("Could Spirits shed/Tears for their lot, it were my lot to weep,/Shewing the road which I shall never tread,/Though my foot points it").  Let's recap: In Mary's short-lived dark night of the soul--let's call it a dark five minutes of the soul--the voice that comes to her aid is...a spirit forever barred from Heaven? Who shows Mary where the Bible is?

Seriously.  What? 

(Then again, "what?" seems to be the most frequent critical response to the White Lady, so I'm keeping decent company.) 

To step back for a moment: the original blog post worked very well as a public notebook entry.  The "publicity" meant that I had to write something other than random jottings; a year later, the faint whisper of an argument there helped me begin to organize the relevant section in my introduction.  Nevertheless, returning to the post after a year revealed how much wasn't there--for example, the real significance of the quotation's context, or the relationship between the White Lady's role here and Captain Clutterbuck's in the frame narrative.  (Short version: a Benedictine monk and his uncle "write up" the novel from a collection of disparate sixteenth-century manuscripts; the Benedictine passes it on to Captain Clutterbuck, assuring him that they have written nothing that might aggravate Protestant readers; Captain Clutterbuck passes it on to the final "editor."  Scott is parodying the Gothic "found manuscript" convention.)  And, of course, I didn't bounce the original post off what scholarship exists on The Monastery (did I mention that most literary historians cringe when this novel comes up in polite conversation?).  Even the most detailed posts I've written here, I think, are at best very rough drafts.      

In person

I've been asked to talk about the keyword "public" in the "Professionalization in a Digital Age" forum at this little annual shindig (where I'll be sharing the podium with Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Lisa Nakamura), and so my thoughts have naturally turned to anxieties about blogging--anxieties expressed by graduate students, by assistant professors, by hiring committees.  Readers who remember Ivan the Terrible Tribble know of what I speak.  Some of the ideas below are very pragmatic; others, more speculative. 

1.  Potential publicity.  At the most practical level, one of the difficulties involved in offering anyone advice about blogging is that there is no way to predict how a search (or tenure) committee will act.  My own experience with hiring has been that a committee member faced with three hundred job applications will not, in all likelihood, Google anybody unless one of the following is true: 1) the applicant explicitly calls the committee's attention to a significant online/blog presence; 2) the applicant says something which sets off alarm bells (e.g., makes claims about work with Professor X which are not backed up by Professor X's letter of rec, or provides what looks like an inaccurate job title).   But there are clearly committees which conduct themselves in an entirely different way.  I'm not sure it's even possible to offer any profitable generalizations about what to do or not to do, given that, in some cases, the fact of breathing may be enough to condemn an applicant in a committee's eyes. 

In the words of A. E. Housman:

          In speculation
          I would not willingly acquire a name
                For ill-digested thought;
                But after pondering much
          To this conclusion I at last have come:
                LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.

And yet, it is possible to have a web presence and be virtually invisible, depending on whether or not a Googler knows the relevant search terms.  It is a truth universally acknowledged that looking for information about X frequently requires you to already have information about X. 

2.  Excess.    In his first essay (see the "Ivan" link), Tribble represented blog reading as a trip into the Twilight Zone: "Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few.  Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag." Bloggers, like the scribbling women and dunces of yore, generate overwhelming quantities of text that leave refined souls whimpering for relief.  The more intrepid explorer finds him- or herself hacking through the spiritual undergrowth, trekking to the outermost reaches of acceptable electronic savvy, or discovering unsavory revelations.  Tribble's blog-induced miseries are all about excessiveness.  Academic bloggers don't just enter the public sphere, they practically flood it--and to such an extent that they render themselves virtually unreadable.  (Excessive publicity paradoxically makes the blogger anonymous.)  Apparently, there's always Too Much Information.

This rhetoric of excess, and variants thereof, characterizes discussions of blogging more generally (e.g., here, here, and here; first two links via Dan.).  Bloggers write too much, too quickly, whether about themselves or others.  When it comes to academic blogging, such excess becomes a sign of an inappropriately managed academic self--insufficiently rational, objective, tasteful, or, for that matter, single-minded.  (I should point out that I do, in fact, think academic bloggers should ponder long and hard about self-presentation, as well as about the ethics of discussing students, colleagues, and so forth.  That's not my primary focus here, however.)  And, some bloggers find that there's a real use-value to less "professional" modes of blogging, even as they are also anxious about it (e.g., here).

3.  Exposure.  We think of blogging as self-exposure.  But what about publicizing other scholars' work, in ways that they might find problematic or even downright rude? This discussion, for example, asks if blogging a seminar presentation without permission constitutes a violation of academic norms (or etiquette).  Blogging about students, colleagues, and administrators raises further questions; I suspect,  for example, that we are all familiar with non-anonymous bloggers who purportedly "anonymize" their colleagues, even though their actual blog posts make it painfully easy to identify who is who.  And what about asking students to blog? For non-bloggers, blogging can look suspiciously like an invasion of privacy, a violation of "safe space," or even an act of intellectual poaching.

4.  Ideas in space.   In order to conceal their identities, pseudonymous bloggers usually have to conceal their specializations and current research projects (e.g., complexification studies).  But non-pseudonymous bloggers also worry about the ramifications of describing work-in-progress: will it be "scooped" by a reader? What happens if someone googles the project during a supposedly double-blind peer review? When ideas sketched out on a blog return to life in a book or article, what do you do with them? (I.e., a blog post is public--but is it published?  Cf. Daniel J. Solove.) But by the same token, discussing research on a blog can make it easier to network with other scholars or gain useful feedback.  If we are to think of blogging as a new twist on the early modern "republic of letters," let alone the Habermasian public sphere, then the ability to exchange information about one's scholarship would seem to be key--and yet, the very publicity of blogging (a blog is not, after all, specifically directed to intended recipients; it's hard to control readership without "locking" the blog altogether) may undermine older modes of scholarly networking and collaboration. 

5.  Gender.  There's a long-running debate about gender and academic blogging, especially anonymous blogging.  To what extent does gender affect how bloggers construct their online personae? Or even their choice of blogging platform? (E.g., LiveJournal vs. Blogger or Typepad.)  If non-blogging academics associate blogging with either the scandalously confessional (sexual, political, departmental) or the merely trivial (shoe-shopping, cat photos), then to what extent do these associations pose different risks for male and female bloggers? What types of gendered risks does publicity pose?

Listing and blogging

The conversation-in-progress about what academic blogs are good for--see Adam Kotso and Dan Green, for example--made me think about the previous electronic frontier of academic conversation: the listserv.  On the one hand, anecdotal evidence suggests that even web-attuned academics frequently ignore or deliberately avoid blogs, even though they subscribe to multiple listservs; on the other hand, equally anecdotal evidence also suggests that blogs have been more successful (in a relative, not an absolute sense) at developing a new "republic of letters," so to speak.   

Adam argues that blogs are best suited to  "gossipy stuff, book recommendations and capsule reviews, calls for bibliographic help, etc. -- that is, the superficial social stuff."  This "superficial social stuff," though, strikes me as a fine description of what goes on in the listservs, where the most successful postings frequently consist of cries for useful information.   Or, to be more precise, cries for complicated or obscure useful information.  (Cries for basic information are frequently the bane of any academic listserv.)  It's not clear to me, however, that listservs have proven to be a useful venue for actual arguments.  Blogs have gained a warranted and sometimes unwanted reputation for "spontaneity," but even so, many bloggers expend a reasonable amount of care on their postings--not the weeks of polishing one might expect for an article, but perhaps a few days for a lengthy post.  E-mail, however, offers a much more seductive (unfortunately so, in many cases) opportunity for rapid response.   Moreover, listservs frequently lack what could be called a centralizing consciousness; whereas a weblog has one or more designated authors who, intentionally or not, often establish the parameters for any given debate, listservs are in practice far more free-wheeling--and often hostile to anyone who appears to be "unfairly" monopolizing the discussion.  (The eighteenth-century list recently featured some small-scale grumbling about one of its more prolific posters--was he making some sort of power grab?)  While the apparently democratic nature of listservs is a virtue--I say "apparently" because various listserv denizens have complained about unspoken academic hierarchies rearing their ugly heads--it now and again devolves, at least on some lists, into a hostility to virtuoso displays of expertise.  (Sometimes, the experts in question could be more adept in demonstrating their skill, it's true.)  Academic blogs tend to be more friendly to experts arguing about their subject matter, as opposed to offering helpful factoids, although the far more public nature of blogs also means that experts in certain fields will attract cranks and/or trolls at a sometimes unpleasant rate. 

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.)