Recently there has been some debate on whether academic blogging is good for you; part of a wider debate about the speed and pressure of contemporary academic life. (You can get a sense of the debate in the articles here and here.) Some of this is prompted by the widely-circulated Manifesto for Slow Scholarship, which points to the supposedly inevitable superficiality of academic interaction in social media channels. It calls for a return to a more leisurely, measured, considered mode of thinking and writing, that produces writing that is fully baked. (There are some sage comments on the manifesto at large on CelebYouth.org.)

This month marks the second birthday of this blog (at least in its current form and location). And so it seemed a good time to look back and see whether there is any evidence here of ‘fast scholarship’ which has been too fast. After an elapse of two years, are there posts here that in retrospect I might wish not to have published ? If so, there would be some justice in the charge.

In that two year period, I counted up some 74 individual posts. Some of these were reports of work that was appearing in print, or in other outlets, including extracts. Some were explicitly partial and forward looking, such as this post inviting comment on an abstract for a forthcoming conference. These have a natural shelf life.

Along with these, there are perhaps 45-50 posts which have the character of an essay: thinking that had not previously been published, and which were an expression of a reasonably settled view. How have these fared ?

Some which contained comment on live issues at a point in time have been overtaken by events and changing circumstances, such that they speak to issues that have either been settled, or have transmuted into something different. An example is this post on the Church of England and women bishops, and this, on disestablishment. Also in this category are various posts on the policy environment for Open Access in the humanities, in which policy statements from government and funders have come thick and fast. Others are in the character of reviews of fast-developing web services, such as Google Scholar Updates. That said, I think these remain reasonable and cogent points to have made at that time, and so I don’t intend to remove them.

But what of the others ? There are areas in which my thinking has deepened since the first time I posted about them. But (crucially) that growth in thought has not been away from the initial post, but deeper and wider in the same soil. This is indeed what  one would hope would happen – the act of first essaying something here is the stimulus to further thought.  And so, I don’t think there are any posts here which I now wish were not here, and not in the archived version in the UK Web Archive. From the evidence of this blog, at least, there is no contradiction between slow scholarship and fast blogging.