blogging

Slow scholarship and fast blogging

peterwebster2 Comments

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.

 

 

In defence of pseudonymity

peterwebster1 Comment

Pseudonymity has had a bad press recently. A moral consensus seems to have formed that there is a problem not merely with behaving badly online while not under your real name, but with adopting a pseudonym at all. Pseudonymous authors “hide” behind their noms de plume; they lack the courage of their convictions; they are in some sense cowardly.

I don’t want here to get into the powerful imperatives of self-preservation that make pseudonymous writing a necessity when resisting a tyrannical government. I’d like to explore the particular reason why I myself blog elsewhere, and tweet, under a pseudonym (which I am clearly not about to disclose here).

I write for a living, more or less. I publish academic works, and blog here and elsewhere on the areas in which I am either directly professionally concerned, or on those subjects in which I am expert enough to make some observations. As more and more historians start “doing history in public”, this hybrid model of communicating what we as scholars do will become more and more important. And, as more and more of the web is routinely archived by the Internet Archive or the UK Web Archive, all of that communication which might previously have happened in person or in conferences, will now persist in the digital record. And since all these various utterances are linked together in various ways, such as Google Authorship, it will become easier for readers to trawl back through them all, and to put them together.

Given this, it is increasingly difficult to keep open a space in which to express an opinion just as a citizen without it becoming part of a professional profile. There are many issues in contemporary life on which I have views, but without any particular expertise. I’ve written elsewhere on the reasons I just write, and some of those thoughts are clarified in my own mind by the discipline of putting them online. And so my “other blog” gives the space to work out those off-piste ideas without them becoming mixed with my more “professional” writing.

And (incidentally) this is why I am not a “public intellectual”. The concept, at least in the UK, seems to involve the bringing to bear of a general intelligence, honed in one field, to matters of more general interest. Stefan Collini and others have already pointed out the tensions in the role. I have no view on whether or not the specific professional reputation of (say) David Starkey in relation to Tudor England is compromised by taking part in The Moral Maze. My point is simply that maintaining a separation between professional and pseudonymous selves in public means the question does not arise.