Academic Blogging - a crucial new form of intellectual discourse

when people ask us what the institute for the future of the book is "about" we start by explaining that we use the word "book" metaphorically - that books are the vehicle humans use to move big ideas around society, the mechanism of intellectual discourse which is relentlessly shifting from print to screen. our mission is to try to understand this evolution well enough that we might even be able to influence it in ways beneficial to present and future society.

we are in a very interesting and crucial time of transition. at the very moment when we face gigantic problems -social and economic inequality on a national and global scale, dramatic long-term threats to the environment, technological shifts of unimagined proportions and consequences, we find ourselves STUCK - unable to carry on a meaningful debate about whither humanity.

the dominant media forms have largely been colonized by corporate interests. we need new media forms wielded in new ways by actors fresh on the stage to re-invigorate discussion.

much attention is focused on the internet which itself is poised to go in one of two diametrically opposed directions - either a mechanism for fostering non-hierarchical communication from many to many or a new top-down broadcast medium dominated by the same mainstream media which is part of the problem and shows no signs of being part of the solution any time soon.

blogging is a very interesting new form - giving power to individual voices which has not been seen since the beginning of the modern press where each "news outlet" was often the output of a single writer with access to a printing press.

one of the most significant developments within the burgeoning blogosphere is the emergence of experts from the academy who are using blogs to talk to a much wider audience outside the university. commenting on this at a recent meeting john mohr, a sociologist at UC, Santa Barbara, suggested that this phenomena of professors moving beyond the walls of the academy to share their knowledge on key issues, blogs should be seen as a crucial attempt to marshall and deploy intellectual capital in new ways for the longterm benefit of society.

academic bloggers face two powerful opposing forces - on the one hand the conservatism of the academy resists accepting this vital new form of sharing knowledge and on the other, mainstream media is trying to coopt these powerful individual voices so they are rendered relatively safe and harmless.

Scenarios

A distribution point for all academic bloggers

What would this be? Well first, as Manan has suggested, we could simply establish a central index of academic blogs - an aggregate of the blogrolls of Crooked Timber, Cliopatria and Pharyngula, plus many others that people submit. Spread the word and provide a simple moderated submission form where other academics can add their blog. This is useful first step at carving out a more defined space for academics in the blogosphere.

while i think this is a wonderful idea and that someone should do it, i'm doubtful of its relationship to our primary goal of encouraging capable academics to become public intellectuals via blogging and the related goals of raising the academic status of blogging and protecting the independence of academic bloggers.

Agreed. We can just encourage folks to do this themselves. Manan and/or John Holbo might be able to pull it together.

Then there is the possibility of Thinkr -- a Flickr, or Revver, for blog posts. A collective archive with a tagging system where people can showcase exemplary blog writing. My instinct is that for this to work, it should consciously establish a sub-genre -- the "note" perhaps -- the kind of blog post that stands outside the 24-48-hour news cycle and deserves a longer shelf life.

my sense is that social software sites such as flickr/revver depend on large numbers of submissions -- would Thinkr as described above get enough to reach critical mass.

i suppose my biggest problem with Thinkr as conceived in this way is that while it may make academic (blog) output available to a wider audience, i'm again not sure how it either raises the academic status of blogging or protects the independent voice of academic bloggers.

[btw, although not blog-related it might be interesting to conceive of Thinkr as a repository of all academic papers, presumably both peer reviewed and not.]

It's hard to predict how it would evolve, but it seems to me that this model would leverage academic blogging more with the general public than with the academy itself. It could become known as the place where academic bloggers archive their best posts. An attractive destination for an intellectually curious web surfer.

This would raise the bar for submission and add a curious twist that would get people intrigued. Any blogger that thinks back on his/her self-publishing career will recall numerous posts that stand on their own as essays, or "notes." Perhaps an entire thread -- a book roundtable a la The Valve, a debate, a series of interviews, a satirical exchange. These too could be tagged and submitted to Thinkr, by the authors or by their peers in the academic blogosphere. In some ways, this system would perform the function of blog carnivals, and certainly, groups and communities could form within the system just as they do in Flickr.

what about the (ongoing) comment stream on the original post; seems like you'd want to make that available some how -- in addition to comments added to the Thinkr list

Ideally, an entry on Thinkr would incorporate (perhaps using RSS) comments from the original blog and possibly interweave them with comments left directly on Thinkr. Or perhaps you'd have two columns of comments in order to leverage Thinkr comments as a peer review mechanism.

Thinkr users would need to be authenticated in some way and to satisfy the basic criteria of being an academic blogger set out above in the manifesto/statement of principles. To what extent Thinkr would involve something approaching a kind of peer review is up for debate. It seems to me the aim is not to offer an equivalent to peer review, but simply to provide a more defined commons for academic bloggers. It could be used, as Clifford described in the case of the physics community, to test run rough work that perhaps contains the seeds of formal papers and journal articles. But I suspect it would also inspire, as people realize the power of the venue, an outpouring of pithy, short essays written for their own sake -- something nicely in between the off-the-cuff blog post and the polished article. Writing, as they would be, just as much for a general readership as for a group of scholarly peers, this new short form might re-invigorate academic writing, casting off much of the jargon and stuffy abstraction that are the trademarks of academic journals.

it seems to me that if Thinkr enabled and encouraged extensive commenting it becomes a new more powerful mechanism for peer reviews. as i understand it, current peer review involves sending a paper to a small number of readers, who effectively become the gatekeepers. suppose on the other hand you made it relatively easy to publish into an environment with extensive commenting -- wouldn't you in the long run end up with a stronger sense of a paper or a note's value?

I think you're right that the comments will be of great value. This might be a reason to separate, as I mention above, Thinkr comments from regular comments.

Blogging is light years from becoming a recognized form of scholarly activity that might count toward tenure. In part, this is due to the not-unjustified stigma attached to blogs that they are sloppy, undisciplined, and too much of the present moment. Carving out a middle space between "publish or perish" and "push-button publishing" -- between "of the moment" and of the archive -- might leverage blogging as a lively yet serious avenue of discourse for academics. Perhaps a strategy for dealing with academics' concerns about tenure and the blogging time-suck, is to emphasize the outreach component in blogging -- to use this as the window through which the whole practice can enter into legitimacy. A Thinkr-type platform would provide a frame that might distinguish academic blogging as a particularly valuable sort of outreach.

i see this approach as too accepting of blogging's poor-cousin status. while i don't think it's realistic to expect people to ignore issues of tenure etc., it would be far better to try to build structures which make blogging (and related forms) acceptable as appropriate "academic" forms than to try to make blogging acceptable by reinforcing it's image as not quite up to academic standards. i.e. let's either bring blogging up to those standards or change the standards. i think that is at the heart of what john mohr means by marshalling and re-deploying intellectual capital.

I think it should be both. Again, the goal is not to make something that is the same as peer review journals or scholarly monographs. The difference is what makes blogging exciting and valuable. But I'm with you in terms of improving blogging's image as more of an an appropriate academic form, either as a more relaxed peer feedback testing ground, or as its own kind of short-form scholarly production (like the "note"). But outreach (perhaps there's a better word) is incredibly important in terms of the general audience. Yes, we want blogging to be taken seriously as part of a scholar's work, but we don't want to academicize it too much. Part of the joy of academic blogging is that they write in regular, human english.

A more modest approach

A less sprawling approach could also be taken. Something based more on the Arts & Letters Daily model of a few carefully selected articles each day. The dearth of choices is one of the things that makes AL Daily so refreshing. Every day, it slices through the imposing mass of possible readings on the web. Perhaps such a model could work for academic blogging. A rotating seat of editors, a daily carnival. Five columns, for example, each representing a discipline or subject area. Each day, a single post appears in each column. History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, and a wild card. Comments on these posts could be seen as a mechanism for peer review.

this isn't uninteresting, but seems to be something that AL daily or another web-based publication could/should do.

It would definitely be a huge job. Would still like to float it out there, but with your comment that it maybe isn't the project WE should be doing.

A "Magnum" for academic bloggers

for me this one has the best chance of both raising the status of blogging and building a sustainable model

I like it too, but I'm still not satisfied in terms of grassroots concerns. Of course, we have to choose our battles. At least for now, I think it's productive to keep wrangling with both the elite and the grassroots ideas.

This is related to and might significantly resemble the previous scenarios. The difference is that we are dealing here with a more strictly defined and selectively chosen membership. Sort of what Magnum is to professional photographers, this league would be for serious blogging academics. Its stamp assures quality and leverages participating writers in the public eye. The Magnum model also establishes opportunities for collective bargaining, which could in turn be used for advantageous advertising schemes to make the whole thing sustainable, and the selling of syndication rights. It could also provide some basic services for its members such as fact-checking and comment moderation.

More to the heart of the matter, a Magnum-type league would help to safeguard gifted academic bloggers from co-option by mainstream media. Providing a framework that increases visibility and helps make blogging more sustainable would diminish the temptation to secure a more comfortable arrangement at the expense of one's independence.

As Bob has roughly outlined, this would begin with a small core of bloggers formed into a cooperative. The bloggers themselves would be responsible for selecting and inviting new members (and for hiring support staff -- though perhaps the institute would provide assistance with this). When appropriate, blogs within a discipline would be more closely linked, and perhaps conversations would occur across these blogs.

When the times and spirit move them, the cooperative could issue highly visible responses to major events in society. "Ten Notes On the Paris Riots," "13 Ways of Looking at Katrina," etc.

Justice League, Fantastic Four: a small portal for A-list academic bloggers

i'm not keen on using the hollywood/society term "A-list" as it injects a certain sense of arrogance and hierarchy. how about just saying "excellent"?

Sure. No attachment whatsoever to A-list.

One take on this is the global hot spot portal that Juan has envisioned: four or five historians with deep expertise on a crisis region giving daily or near-daily news digests and analysis of the sort you won't find in any mainstream paper. The front page could be organized by geographic area with headlines or threads advertised in each section. The hot spot portal could also be part of a slightly bigger portal. Three nodes -- e.g. history, science and philosophy -- each with a group of academics elucidating and demystifying the major stories of our times. Each of these sections would start with a single blogger who would then select a partner. The two of them would, in turn, select a third peer and so on.

not clear to me why the magnum model and fantastic four models aren't one and the same as there is no reason why under the magnum model there aren't smaller subsets such as Juan's regional experts or 4 physicists or 3 economists.

That's true. What we need to figure out is when Magnum is simply an affiliation where you are linked to by the mothership site, and when Magnum's site actually contains the blogs, as in the case of the hot spot portal (or maybe not). It could be as simple as a badge that you display prominently on your site. But if we're talking about this more complicated apparatus with fact-checking, comment moderation, advertising and syndication, then it becomes a little more involved. Thoughts?