...is your blog on your c.v.?
Does the (academic) blog carry enough respect in the academic world to be thus enshrined?
Is blogging as dangerous to the potential graduate student as it was to the job-seeker, ca. 2005?
What about other online activities, such as organizing scholarly, semi-scholarly, or potentially scholarly efforts on flickr and other digital media?
Of course, one answer might be, "It depends on the blog".
(For easy reference, I link Bill Caraher's fundamental essay on the topic, 'Blogging Archaeology and the Archaeology of Blogging')
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3 comments:
Hi Dan ... thanks for this.
I've been trying to stitch my professional self together online via http://homepages.nyu.edu/~te20/. I'm reacting a bit to all the Bamboo talk about "a social network for the humanities," which I think is a misnomer. I think we should be talking about professional and social networking by and among humanists. Just as one's pre/extra-cyber network spans many contexts and venues, I think so does/should/must one's online persona (and in fact I don't think that, professionally, the two should be disjoint either).
So, one finds there some linkup (html and feed versions of) my cv, my blogging/commenting/writing/publishing, what I'm reading/citing (social bookmarking/bibliography), and various project things. There's some rudimentary social graph encoding underneath, but I haven't yet delved into pointing at other individuals.
I've been wanting to blog about this for a while, but now your comment has given me an even lower-impedance opening! I look forward to hearing where this discussion goes, and hope that some folks will comment on what I'm doing both on the page referenced above and with the side bar on my blog at http://horothesia.blogspot.com, which surfaces some of those same resources under different skins.
Dan Cohen had an interesting post on blogging and scholarship a couple of weeks ago: "Leave the Blogging to Us" in Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog (5 December 2008).
Bill Carraher had another good, relevant post last week: "Blogging and Genre" in The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World (9 December 2008).
By the way, I've been checking in from time to time on what you've been doing with inscriptions in Flickr. I'd be interested in discussing how we might find ways to socially hook up epigraphic photography (amateur and academic) in flickr with other digital resources for epigraphy.
Best,
Tom
A negative effect of being a blogger: A reviewer of an article manuscript of mine criticized my writing for being too "blog-like." In this paper I was deliberately trying to be light, breezy, and provocative (blog-like, I guess), but this was not appreciated for a high-brow anthropology journal (I did have lots of citations and other scholarly stuff). The paper was rejected, mainly because the reviewers couldn't figure out what I was trying to say. So I will rewrite it for an archaeology journal, but I will retain the blog-like prose because I think it will help provoke readers.
A positive effect: a reviewer of a grant proposal praised the fact that I had a project blog. Unfortunately I am embarrassed by the fact that I don't keep up that blog very well.
I have no idea whatsoever whether my blogging is appreciated by my university, my unit, or my colleagues. I get virtually no feedback from them about this. I do get feedback from colleagues at other universities, and from students (at my university and elsewhere).
I blog because it's the closest replacement I can find to the actual collegiality of a department: I work online, by myself, for a couple of different institutions, so the blog is my outlet and my connection to the wider world of ideas. It helps my writing process, and it lets me get ideas out of my head to a location where something might sprout.
As a postdoc, I was encouraged to take my simulation work (which lived at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~grahams ) into a blog format by the people I met at the University of Nebraska Lincoln's Digital Humanities workshop in 2006. So I've been quite happy to put the blog on my CV. I list it both in my initial contact details and under 'digital works' where I include some of the meta-data to give an indication of impact.
As an archaeologist, the blog hasn't helped me -yet- in my job searches (...a voice in the wilderness...). On the other hand, as an online educator, it would I think be remarkable if I didn't have one.
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