To blog or not to blog? Will it hurt or enhance a career? In what ways can it augment academic book sales and foster community?
Adam Kotsko’s (tongue in cheek) reply:
The monograph: dead. The peer-reviewed journal: dead. The classroom: dead. Only blogging can guarantee the future of academic discourse, and indeed it is the only thing keeping it alive in the present! Open up your eyes, people! Look around you! Everywhere you look: blogs, beautiful blogs! Our blogs will give us tenure. Our blogs will give us cultural relevance. Our blogs will help us get the attention of that girl from college who was really cool but only seemed to want to date assholes. And if we manage to get into a flamewar along the way, all to the good.
Some links to discussions about academic blogging:
- Joseph Kugelmass from The Valve on the questions raised by academic blogging.
- An enthusiastic view of academic blogging at Inside Higher Ed.
- Bitch PhD on the risks of academic blogging and the value of pseudonymity.
- The Scholar and Feminist Online with an issue on Blogging Feminism, with its affiliated blog discussion.
- UC Davis’ panel discussion on “Historical Scholarship and the New Media.”
- An issue of Lore (an e-journal for teachers of writing) centered on the topic of Academic Blogging
- The Chronicle of Higher Eduction’s perspective.
- AcademicBlog wiki’s listing of History Blogs.
- Critical Mass on the perils of academic blogging, a cautionary tale based on the experience of the Phantom Professor.
- Adam Kotsko (see quotation above), writing on his weariness with academic blogging at Inside Higher Ed.
