Front Page News

Well, the MLA blogger meet-up made front page news—at the new Inside Higher Ed, published by Scott Jaschik (formerly of the Chronicle).

The article (actually the F2F discussion that produced it) spurs me to say a little more about my own blogging practices, which I’ve never explicitly addressed here. It’s true, as stated in the article, that I assume my department chair (and other colleagues) might see anything and everything I write. I also assume my wife will see anything and everything I write. And my students. Maybe even my parents. (The horror!) My blog is largely a professional venue—”public workbench” is the phrase I fall back on. So most of what I post falls into the catagory of things at least loosely related to my academic life. I don’t know about you, but I gave up trying to organize my bookmarks some time back around 1996. So my blog, as a searchable database, functions in part as a professional organizer. There’s also the occassional bit of whimsy.

People often assume blogs must be about politics. That’s only because the high-profile bloggers in the media write about politics. I’m thinking of people like Wonkette or Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. But there’s no reason why politics must be the default modality for blogging. A blog is a piece of software, or, more prosaically, an empty vessel. A blog is whatever you do with it.

I have my political convictions, but I don’t write about them here. My blog sits on an institutional server and I respect that. If I want to blog overtly political topics then I can go and get a third party ISP. Truth be told, I suspect my political views are pretty pedestrian for a white, male, thirty-something junior academic raised in an upper middle class more or less progressively-minded household. Blogging my predictable outrages doesn’t seem like the best use of my time, or yours.

During our conversation with Scott, the question came up as to whether we wanted our blogs to count toward tenure. The answer there too is: it depends. Blogs are heterogenous. You can’t essentialize the genre. This blog, even though it’s often focused on my teaching and research, does not in itself constitute something I see as a professional accomplishment. (I would, however, include the work I’ve done with blogging in the classroom.) GHW, Chuck, on the other hand, pointed out that his Chuck’s blog, with 40-50 substantive film reviews, is in itself almost a book.

Speaking of books, where I’m most aggresive, I suppose, is posting bits and pieces of my scholarly writing. This is a practice that goes back to my disseration days, when I was inspired by a stunt Harlan Ellison once pulled, writing a short story in the window of a bookstore. I always like that image, and I always had the instinct that it could be generative for academic work, at least given my work habits. Years ago I hoped to write my disseration live, on the network. That proved unfeasible, largely due to issues like version control—every morning I changed a comma in the online version I spent all afternoon also changing it in the various other locales where the files lived. What I wanted, I now realize, was a blog. Has anyone out there started a disseration blog yet? I’d like to know.

The first question people always ask about posting my work is about plagiarism. That’s a red herring. Blogs and other online venues are the ideal vehicles for putting your ideas in circulation, for associating them with you. Poe’s purloined letter is a story about stolen words, but it’s also about hiding in plain sight. As work picks up on my book this spring I expect to post a number of additional excerpts here.

So thanks to Scott for talking to us, and to my fellow bloggers for the face time and reflections. See everyone next year in Washington, when the moiling chaos of the MLA is on my home turf.