[Previous posts include:
- Mark G's "Should we blog our pre-publication ideas?" - this is focussed on the prepublication question of his title and not my main interest here;
- Stephen's own "Blogging Our Pre-Publication Ideas"
- and a response to it from a blogger I had not "met" before Patrick George McCullough of Kata ton Biblon on "The purpose of blogging?"
easier to make it into a more coherent paper first and then convert some of it into blog posts after the fact.He speculates
It is a little bit different, as I'm not planning on publishing it.Actually, I don't think that this difference is significant, though maybe the question of the sort of coherence required IS.
In that connection Stephen quotes my SBL Forum article, "Hypertext and Publication in Biblical Studies" (May 2004), concerning text and hypertext and how each relates to different scholarly genres. He then poses the question:
Where does blogging fit into this? It is more like text or hypertext?He notes the supercficial linearity of a blog post - a text-like feature, but goes on to note also the tendency for blog posts to be short and reverse chronological (newest at the top) as hypertext-like features.
He concludes with the provocative comment:
Early discussions of hypertext often focused on the reader’s experience. Perhaps blogging ought to be viewed as the new hypertext, but from the writer’s perspective.Such a focus on the "writerly" nature of blogging is a major reason why blogs are seen as a feature of Web 2.0 (whatever that convenient but infuriating slogan cliche actually means!), and after all many of any blogs readers are themselves bloggers... (How many of Kevin's ["Google Analytics"] "women ... named Suzanna", and the rest of us, ourselves have blogs?!)
And, this writing for and in a community of writers (or several overlapping communities as most of us do) gives a blog post another and perhaps more significantly hypertextual feature, posts link. Unlike many self-conscious hyper-texts this linking is not often internal. [Except where the author is trying to subvert the nature of the medium, "by imposing a linear structure on top of the blog, for example, by naming conventions for each post or limiting hypertext links to the next post in the desired “logical” sequence."]
Most blog posts though have one or several external links, connecting this coherent fragment of text to other fragments by other authors, surely an epitome of hyper-textuality. ¶ 2:14 PM
[to Del.icio.us]
Most blog posts though have one or several external links, connecting this coherent fragment of text to other fragments by other authors, surely an epitome of hyper-textuality.
But then most good old-fashioned printed academic books and papers have "one or several external links, connecting this coherent fragment of text to other fragments by other authors". They are called footnotes and references. The difference in a blog is simply that the links are more conveniently followed, they just need a click rather than a trip to the library. I don't see a difference of principle here.
By 
Peter Kirk, at
January 17, 2007 1:10 AM
Good to "meet" you, Tim. Thanks for including me in the discussion! Just to clarify: one of the differences I was considering between pre-publishing work and not-intended-to-be-published work was the whole premature revelation issue. I don't feel like posting my women in ministry paper in blog post segments puts me at any great risk of showing my publishable cards, so to speak.
I think Peter has a good point. To add to it, one can notice the vast array of old-fashioned printed academic books that are available on Google Books and Amazon "Search Inside." So the immediacy may even be closer than the library (or waiting for an inter-library loan). Ehrman's LCL edition of the Apostolic Fathers, for example, is completely available on Amazon and at least mostly on Google Books. One can also find plenty of full text articles online, sometimes through a library subscription and sometimes just freely available.
It seems that more and more there is a conflation of the "hypertext" world (though I'm still not sure how we're defining that) with traditional academic resources. I think it makes for exciting and creative possibilities. Frankly, I'm glad I'm working on joining academia at such an interesting time.
Peace,
Pat
