Academic Blogging: What are the benefits?

Continuing on with Joshua Mann's questions (see Why Blog? and When and Why?), he asks next:

2. What are a few of the benefits you see in blogging?

I suppose one could ask about the benefits to the blogger and the benefits to the reader.  It's easier to talk about the benefits to the blogger.  Academics are a big-headed bunch and blogging gives them a nice outlet for their desire for self-publicity.  And the nice thing about academic blogs is that not many people read them, so the academics can get on their soapbox and go and sound off to a handful of readers and get that out of their system, hopefully honing their purer and better thoughts for proper publications like books and articles.

I sometimes wonder whether one should think of publication as being on a continuum, from tweets to blogs to critical notes to articles to introductory books to monographs.  The summit of all publication is the monograph, and the well-written monograph actually takes some real skill and effort.  Tweets, on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered.  Blogs are somewhere in between.  They take a bit more effort than a tweet but like them they are pretty ephemeral.  It's remarkable just how quickly we forget them, and that's if we ever read them in the first place.

When it comes to the benefits to the reader, I think there is one major benefit and here, again, I have to point to Jim Davila's Paleojudaica as a fine example of the genre.  The blogs have genuinely had some success in holding the media to account.  Extravagant claims in the media have often been successfully challenged in the blogs.  Here the collaborative, "horizontal" nature of some of the best blogs has made a key contribution because where many eyes look at the same data, they are more likely to notice key elements. Further, the range of different expertises in the different blogs also plays its part.

I'd like to think also that the blogs have helped those who read them to be a bit better informed about developments in our area.  I know that when I talk to the (vast majority of) colleagues who never read the blogs, I am often surprised about news items they have missed.  If you read the blogs, you do get to hear about interesting discoveries, new TV and radio programmes, sad deaths in the area, conference announcements, new books, new journals, new journal entries and so on.

So while we might poke fun at the bloggers, and laugh at their self-indulgence, in fact they have proved their worth in recent years by keeping us all informed and engaged, and sometimes, if all too rarely, entertained and amused.

Academic blogging: When and Why?

Now that my ridiculous pre-amble is written, here is the first of my answers to Joshua Mann's questions, with thanks for his interest, and apologies, in advance, if my answers are a bit rubbish. Question one and answer follows:

1. When and why did you start blogging?  

"When" is easier than "why".  If only it were this easy with dating the Gospels!  For the Gospels, I'm inclined to think there that the "why" is easier than the "when".  We know only roughly when the Gospels were written (sometime after 70, I argue), but it's fairly obvious why they were written (to tell the "good news" about Jesus Christ in narrative fashion to as many as far as possible).

But yes, it's about ten years since I started blogging.  I started blogging because I thought it would be fun.  Jim Davila was already doing it on Paleojudaica and he was brilliant at it.  He still is.  Somehow, Jim just has an instinct for how to do it well, and to this day I don't think there is anyone who has such a natural, instinctive feel for medium as Jim has.  Somehow, he is able to get exactly the right balance between between reporting the latest in the area and providing compelling, accurate and lucid comment, and without the sort of self-indulgence that is all to common elsewhere.

Actually, since I've started on this, let me rant a little longer.  What I like about Paleojudaica, and the reason that it is still the blog that provides the template, is that it understands what academic blogging is about.  It is about critical engagement with what else is out there on the net pertaining to the area in question.  Sometimes -- more often than not -- Jim can see that all that you need is a link and a description. Let the punters know what is out there -- quick link, quick description, quick bit of background,with links, if necessary.

But sometimes, Jim knows that a bit more is needed.  Because of the trust he gains by means of the sober, newsy items, he is able to add a little more comment when it is required. And he gains the reader's trust by giving us a whole list of background links.  "For background, see here", etc.  The reader is calmly assured that there is a history to to whatever the item is, and you will be able to follow it up in the blog.

I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons for the continued strength of Paleojudaica is that he has resisted adding a facility for comments.  I recently distinguished between what I call the "horizontal" blogs and the "vertical" blogs.  Vertical bloggers thrive on the interaction with their own commenters and generally resist the "horizontal" interaction with fellow bloggers.  Jim is the opposite.  With no comments at all, he can interact with other blogs where necessary, and with the focus on the news, he can avoid the self-indulgence that is too easy for those whose blogs largely focus on their own ideas and enthusiasms.  Moreover, he does pick up and engage with email commenters and my guess is that this too enhances the quality of the product.

But yes, it was because of Paleojudaica that I began blogging.  There was another major issue which was unique to me, however, which was that I was running a website called The New Testament Gateway that was giving me some grief.  Long before I had heard about blogging, I used to have a "log book" on the site which I used to record every update to the site.  I also used to have a "Featured Links" section.  A decade ago, it occurred to me that I could combine the idea of blogging, following Jim, with some of the peripherals from my NT Gateway, like the log book and the featured links section.  And this worked well for several years until I leased off the NT Gateway from the blog, and the NT Gateway blog became the NT Blog, as it is now.  So that's all to say that my blog was never quite the same as the purer biblioblogs.  It used to be an integral part of the NT Gateway, and you can see that if you look back through the archives, but now it is its own strange, malformed beast.

One last thing.  I love the fact that there are a million other blogs in the area and to a large extent, this has helped me to post less.  In the early days of the biblioblogs, when it was just me, Jim Davila, Jim West, AKMA, Stephen Carlson, Rubén Gómez, Tim Buckley and co, there were few reporting and commenting on the key news stories.  But now, you can guarantee that someone has got to it before you, and that enables you to be much more selective.

Why blog?

In one of my favourite TV series ever, The Prisoner (1967), there is an episode dealing with 1960s anxieties about the ever-increasing powers of the computer.  The episode is called "The General".  In the episode, our hero, Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) confounds the computer by asking it a question that has long been "insoluble . . . for man or machine".  The question is "WHY?"  But of course the answer to the question has always had a solution ready to hand.  The answer is, of course, "Why not?"

I feel the same way about blogging.  If someone asks me "Why blog?", my answer is "Why not?"  There is actually a danger in getting too navel-gazing about it.  If you want to blog, or think you might want to blog, give it a go.  See how it goes.  If you enjoy it, great.  If others enjoy it, even better.  If not, you've not lost anything, except perhaps a little time.

I was recently perusing the wayback machine's archive of the old Biblioblog interviews as part of my research for a paper I was writing for the SBL International (Biblioblogs.com still defunct).  Happily, the Biblioblog Top 50 has now rescued these from oblivion.  One of the things that is fun about looking at these interviews is that several of them are of bloggers that have long since vanished from the blogosphere.  And I think that that's great.  It's not great that they have gone (I loved Bruce Fisk's, for example), but it is great that they gave it a go and found that it was not for them.

Recently, Joshua Mann asked me a series of questions about blogging, one of which was "Why blog?", to which the answer is definitely, "Why not?"  Several have already had a go at Joshua's questions and have done a great job -- see his blog.

I suppose that what I am trying to get at is that you don't know until you've tried.  Why not give it a go?  I kind of love blogging and wish I did it more often.  And I suspect that there are loads of people who would be great at it who never give it a go.  And there are loads of people who are rubbish at it and who should probably have given up on it.

I was going to get to Joshua's questions in this blog post, but realize now that I have spent so long on my pre-amble that I am going to have to wait for the next post to answer the actual questions.  And that illustrates something about blogging -- it is spontaneous, self-indulgent, ephemeral and probably a complete waste of space.

Great discussions of the biblioblogs -- another request

I was delighted by the response to my post Blogging Mark - Input Requested Please.  The comments there have very much helped me to think through my paper on Mark in the digital age for the SBL International coming up soon in St Andrews.

In writing that paper, I am footnoting some good, round-up discussions of the blogs and blogging in our area, and I am keen to get some links in to a range of good discussions, and not just repeating my own boring stuff.  What I am thinking of are those posts that reflect critically on the successes and failures of the biblioblogging phenomenon over the last decade or so.  My footnote currently reads (and please excuse the ugly formatting because it's pasted from a horrible old MS Word document):

For reflections on the history and development of blogs in this area, see especially James R. Davila, “Assimilated to the Blogosphere: Blogging Ancient Judaism,” SBL Forum , April 2005, http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=390; “Enter the Bibliobloggers,” University of St Andrews School of Divinity Website, November 2005, http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/abstracts/enterthebibliobloggers/, and “What Just Happened: The rise of ‘biblioblogging’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century”, 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Atlanta, http://paleojudaica.blogspot.co.uk/2010_11_14_archive.html#1715486029034288246.  See also Mark Goodacre, “Pods, blogs and other time-wasters,” NT Blog, 17 November 2011, http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/pods-blogs-and-other-time-wasters.html.

In other words, at this point, it's just Jim and me.  What other nice round-up reflective posts on the biblioblogging phenomenon should I add?  Thanks for your help.  This is a great example of the communal internet and the joys of horizontal blogging!

Peer-reviewed article responding to a blog post: what is the etiquette?

In a blog post back in 2010, I sketched out an idea that had occurred to me in class one day, that a conjectural emendation might explain one of the bizarre and famous features of our one major textual witness to the Gospel of Peter, A Walking, Talking Cross or the Walking, Talking Crucified One?  I suggested that the scribe may have misinterpreted a nomen sacrum for σταυρωθεντα ("crucified one"), instead imagining that σταυρον ("cross") was meant.

In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Theological Studies, Paul Foster provides a detailed critique of the blog post, "Do Crosses Walk and Talk? A Reconsideration of Gospel of Peter 10.39–42", JTS 64 (2013): 89-104.  The article is now available to view for subscribers.  At a future point, perhaps when I have worked up the idea fully for publication, I would like to comment on the content of the article, but in this post I'd like to reflect a little on the phenomenon of a peer-reviewed article in a major journal providing a full critique of a blog post.

I will confess to mixed feelings.  On one level, I am really flattered that Foster, and the editors of JTS, regarded my blog post of sufficient merit to warrant an extended response, and I am grateful to them, I think, for noticing my blog and regarding it so highly.  On another level, I have to admit that it makes me slightly uneasy to see my random jottings here subjected to the same kind of detailed critique that one would normally reserve for scholarly books and peer-reviewed articles.

The difficulty in part may be that there is not really any established etiquette for this kind of thing.  Blogs and the blogging phenomenon are still pretty young, and we don't really know yet how they should fit into the scholarly landscape.  Should we treat them like casual academic gossip, a kind of online senior common room, or is every post fair game for a full, formal response in a peer-reviewed journal?

One thing that focuses the discussion for me is to compare the status of the blog post with the status of the academic conference paper. Many scholars add a kind of rider to their conference papers, "Work in progress; not to be cited" and so on.  The point there is that conference papers are for discussion at conferences but not (yet) in formal publications.  I think I see something similar for blog sketches like mine -- it will, I hope, eventually make its way to publication, but it does not yet have that kind of status. Indeed, in the case in question, I did subsequently present the idea in a conference paper (International SBL, London, 2011), which will form the basis of a future formal publication.

For me, the blog is something more informal, more chatty than the published paper.  I write differently here from the way that I write in peer-reviewed articles. My tone is much more colloquial.  I speak differently in the classroom, differently again in the NT Pod.  So now that I look back at the blog post in question, I notice that I talk casually about the cross "bouncing out of the tomb"; I use a little cartoon illustration; I speak in the first person a good deal and I speculate openly. It is all round much more informal and colloquial.

This not to say that the discussion of blog posts in formal publications ought to be out of bounds.  I have myself published an article discussing the role played by blogs in the discussion of the Talpiot Tomb (The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers).  Others like James Crossley have written extensively on the blogging phenomenon and what it may reveal about the guild.  Nevertheless, I think there is a difference between those sorts of broader discussions about the phenomenon and writing at length about a blog report of work in progress, a post that is explicitly a kind of work-in-progress sketch.

But perhaps I am wrong about this.  I have had some discussion with Paul Foster via email, and I have corresponded also with one of the editors of JTS who expressed some surprise at my reaction to the publication.  I'd be interested to hear what others think about the etiquette here.  For one thing, I can't remember another example of this, and if Paul Foster and JTS are trend-setting, it may be worth our while thinking through the implications this has for the topics and the tone of our blogs.  I suspect that it will make an impact on how far and in what manner I sketch out new research ideas on this blog but this too may require some additional thought.

Vertical Blogs vs. Horizontal Blogs

In the early days of blogging, when there were only a handful of us at it (among biblioblogs, Davila, McGrath, West, Carlson, Cook, AKMA, Williams, Brannan, Seland and co), it was pretty easy to have a conversation if you wanted.  You only had a handful of blogs to read. I used to look forward to the day when more would join in.  Excuse me if this sounds disgustingly nostalgic, but I liked the conversational aspect of the the blogs, the exchange of ideas that made them like a virtual academic common room.  Several of us had cut our teeth on the academic e-lists that were in their heyday in the late 1990s and often the blogs took over where they left off.  As the popularity of the e-lists waned, so the blogs increased in popularity, all the more so as several of the bloggers were those who already had an internet presence, whether through websites, e-lists or both.

Now there are so many blogs in our area that it is practically impossible to keep up.  Broadly speaking, this is a wonderful thing.  There is a richness of resources available, a hundred different conversations on lots of different topics.  I am often lost in wonder at how many brilliant conversations are taking place.  Although, of course, the blogs vary in quality, I tend to be impressed -- I learn a huge amount, often far more than I learn from journals or monographs, from those who blog in our area.  Perhaps it's something about the skills required to write in a digestible, current, coherent format that makes the blogs in our area so strong.

I have always thought of the blogs as being "horizontal", sharing with one another, interacting with one another, critically engaging with one another in a kind of global conversation.  I love it.  I think of it as a community in which I participate, often unevenly, often passively, usually quietly, listening rather than contributing, but still part of the community.

But there is a new trend too over the last year or two towards a different kind of blog, what I call the "vertical" blog.  I don't mean to be critical here (and even if I were, the bloggers concerned would not read my post anyway, so it would not matter), but the vertical blog conceives of the blogging phenomenon a little differently.  It sees blogging less as a conversation among like-minded colleagues and more as a kind of educational service, a means of disseminating the results of scholarship to a broader audience than can be reached through books alone.

The vertical blog is usually written by a senior, well respected professor in the discipline who is taking time to set out the issues for the broader public.  As such, the vertical blog performs a hugely important service, touching many who might well be turned off by the wordy, technical, in-house nature of some of the horizontal blogs.  Just take my frequent posts on the Synoptic Problem over the last nine years, for example.  They generally get few comments, and occasional expressions of bafflement.

Vertical bloggers generally just look up and down, up at the post that they have written and down at the comments that it has generated.  This kind of blog does not look sideways to engage in discussions with the myriad other bloggers, perhaps not surprisingly given the ever-increasing numbers of us.

The vertical blogs have value for the rest of us, the horizontal bloggers.  Most importantly, they are granting the medium a kind of legitimacy that may in the long run be hugely beneficial.  Blogging is no longer a kind of fringe-activity for the mavericks on the edge of the academy.  Now even the big boys and girls are doing it.

Although I am grateful for the advent of the vertical blogs, I must admit that I still have a preference for good, old-fashioned conversations among the horizontal bloggers who read one another, listen to one another and engage critically with one another.  But it is a personal preference, and it may well simply be the result of a kind of nostalgia for the way we used to live.

Pods, blogs and other time-wasters

I have been invited by the Student Advisory Board at the Society of Biblical Literature to speak at a session on the "Wired-in Generation".  It is on Saturday at 1pm and the details of the program are at the bottom of this post.  My title is "Pods, Blogs and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship?"

Putting "pods" at the front of that title is a deliberate and self-indulgent reference to my own attempts at podcasting, something that at this point still marks out my own online output as a little different from others'.  In spite of the massive proliferation of academic blogs in recent years, there are still relatively few podcasts around, thinking especially of genuine podcasts, i.e. programmes produced specially for the occasion of disseminating via the internet, and not just online recordings of lectures.

Having produced the NT Pod for over two years now, I am still struck at how podcasting differs from a lot of the other stuff one does online.  Somehow, perhaps because it takes so much longer to prepare, record and produce a podcast than it does to blog, it feels like it has a longevity that the blogs lack.  But perhaps it is just that it is a relatively new medium.  Perhaps podcasts will, in the long run, go the way of other experiments on the net and will come to be seen as "of their time", dated, forgettable, a waste of time.

My title is, of course, slightly facetious given that I have "wasted" a huge amount of my own time in online activities.  First, back in the mid to late 90s, it was the e-lists.  I still remember the thrill of participating in the e-lists, first b-greek and Crosstalk and later also Synoptic-L and several others.  The late 90s were their hey-day.  Back then, the whole world was not on email and it now seems extraordinary to imagine that it was actually a thrill to receive an email.  And to receive emails from all around the world and to be able to reply instantly, arguing about some element of Greek grammar, or some theme in Historical Jesus scholarship -- it was genuinely exciting stuff.

I have similar memories of the early days of blogging, roughly a decade ago.  When Jim Davila began his Paleojudaica blog, I read it avidly.  It was the first blog I remember even being aware of.  It wasn't long before I wanted to begin my own, then as a sister to the New Testament Gateway site that I had been running since the late nineties, though later under its own NT Blog heading. Back then blogging was easy, innovative and fun.  With so few people blogging in our area, there were only a handful of blogs to read, and that gave one more time to write.  There was a thrill in exploring the new medium, and I loved it.

The email lists have not gone away, but their importance has diminished massively now that we are all desperately fighting to stay on top of the hoards of daily emails, longingly imagining that simpler world that we once inhabited with its letters, memos and time for reading.  Looking back on the heyday of the e-lists, I can't help thinking that I must have wasted a huge amount of time on them.  It really felt like it mattered when one was deep in debate with someone about some point of Greek grammar, or some argument for the existence of Q.  But what value was it really?  I am embarrassed to think of the boldness with which we circulated our half-baked opinions and relieved to think that lots of that stuff has vanished from the net, never to be seen again.

But what about blogs?  What about the time spent blogging?  Could it have been spent more profitably doing something else instead, like reading a book, taking a walk or sleeping? I remember how people would sometimes comment on the time stamps on my posts, so often written in the early hours of the morning.  I used to say that that was the only way that I could find time to blog, and I think I believed it.  Why didn't I just take life a little easier?  Or why didn't I write more real stuff and get more published?

3,604 posts in eight years.  Hundreds of thousands of words.  Hours, days, weeks of time wasted.  Why did I bother?  Why do any of us bother?  After all, I am not the most prolific blogger, not by a long shot.  How much time has been burned up by the likes of uber-bloggers like James McGrath, Jim West and Joel Watts?

Back in the early days of doing scholarship on the internet, I remember being asked by another scholar about the value of this sort of work, not, at that point, blogging, but e-lists, websites and the like.   I was working in the UK at the time where we had a thing called the "Research Assessment Exercise".  I wouldn't be able to submit any of my internet stuff to that, would I?  I was a little take aback by the question.  It had never even occurred to me that the internet stuff might be taking me away from proper scholarship, the kind of stuff that one could submit to the RAE.  Perhaps he was right; perhaps this is not the way for a true scholar to behave.

Anyone who has had a blog for a while will be aware of just how short our memories are.  When the same old question comes back around again -- there is a kind of blog cycle -- it is rare for one of us to say, "Oh, I remember a great post about that two or three years ago."  Blogs are ephemeral.  Blog posts do not endure.  Even if you keep a full archive of everything you have ever posted, the vast majority of your posts, the great bulk of activity, 99% of your output evaporates from consciousness.  Here today, gone tomorrow.

I have often been surprised at what I forget of my own blogging activity.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference in a recent article written by John Lyons, and published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, to something I had once said here about the conflict between the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment in historical Jesus research.  It was a good thought, I think, but one that I had completely forgotten. 

But here is another thought.  Perhaps I would have forgotten that idea forever if I had not blogged it.  Perhaps this is one of the values of a blog -- it is the chance to put down a marker in the sand, to share some thoughts, to put things out there and to see what happens.  Indeed, this is one of the values of the medium -- it is a little more than the casual conversation but a little less than the published piece.  It can occupy a kind of middle ground.  It is a sketch pad, but it is also interactive.  If you are lucky, people talk back.

A New Testament scholar once asked my advice on starting a blog in order to support his new book that was coming out, to give it a bit of extra publicity and to provide a place where people could come and interact with him about the book.  I advised caution.  Blogs that are set up to support publications seldom last very long, not least because they end up being rather self-possessed and narrow.  The most successful blogs, or the ones that I like reading, are those that range widely, blogs that chat about topics that are outside the narrowly defined area of a particular scholar's research interest, and touch on ephemera related more broadly to the discipline.

They are great for intellectual tidbits, the things you just can't resist sharing but know will never make it into one of your publications.  They are places for notes about teaching, for reflections on the funny side of scholarship, for research ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day.  And it's worth thinking too of those ideas that are better left to the blog alone, or would have better left even off the blog.  Sometimes blogging is all you need to do to convince yourself that an idea does not have legs and can be quietly dropped.

I don't think I'd advise anyone to start a blog unless there was a chance that they would be become an enthusiast.  In the end, it has to be its own reward.  The same is true with those other bits of public technology, podcasts, gateway sites, even the ones that now look long in the tooth, the e-lists, the scholarly websites.  That's why I don't regret the time I have spent online.  I have enjoyed it and it is just possible that it has made me a better scholar.  It's certainly given me some practice in writing, in interacting with others, and in improving my teaching.

I suppose that what I am saying to the graduate students is that it really is a waste of time to blog, to podcast, even to tweet, if you are doing it for its own sake, to gain recognition or something like that.  But if it's something you'd enjoy, it does have its rewards.  I sometimes think, "That's bloggable!" even if I don't get around to blogging it.  Or "I could do a podcast on that!" even when I never find the time to sit down and record.   And that's something that can keep you sane, which can't be a bad thing.

Engaging the "Wired-In Generation": Knowledge and Learning in the Digital Age
11/19/2011
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Room: 3002 - Convention Center

Theme: Hosted by the Student Advisory Board

Teresa Calpino, Loyola University of Chicago, Presiding
Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Pods, Blogs, and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship? (15 min)
Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University
On the Internet No One Knows You're a Grad Student, Or How Social Media Can Help You, Build You Up, and Tear You Down (15 min)
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
Videoconferencing in the Classroom: Broadening the Horizons of Students through Interactive Scholarly Exchange(15 min)
Discussion (30 min)

Just how much do we forget?

In writing my paper for the SBL Ideological Criticism section, reflecting on James Crossley's Jesus in an Age of Terror, I have been shocked to find out just how much I have forgotten.  In order to get a feel for the blogs discussed by Crossley, I went back and re-read lots of blog entries and I was shocked to see just how much I had forgotten.  I am not just talking about blogs that I have paid scant attention to at the time, but also the old favourites, like Jim Davila's Paleojudaica or N. T. Wrong.  The biblioblogs are full of wonderful and fascinating posts and heaps of erudition, and yet the vast majority of the posts vanish from our consciousness extraordinarily quickly.  I am not quite sure whether I find this encouraging or discouraging.  I think it is fantastic that there are so many brilliant posts still out there for us tap into whenever we have the chance, like scholarly diaries of major events in the academic life.  But on another level it troubles me that here we are, busily writing away, for our thoughts to vanish in the wind, making scarcely the most fleeting impact, when all this time we could have been spending more time on books and articles that might actually have some kind of legacy.

From Blog to Book?

How do you like the idea of taking the best of your blog, including lots of the comments, and converting it to book form? Mary Beard has led the way on this one:

It's a Don's Life: The Book

Mary Beard

. . . . The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc. . . .

Sounds like an interesting experiment. Is this an example of the blog coming of age? Initially the idea seemed strange to me, but then one of the most enjoyable (to me) genres of book is the diary, something that initially belongs to a different forum than the published book, so perhaps it is not so daft.

So which biblioblogger would you like to see following in Mary Beard's footsteps? Or would this not work in our area? Are we all a bit too dull?

Beginning Blogging Questions

A correspondent thinking of starting a new blog recently got in touch and asked me a series of questions, and he has encouraged me to post my answers here. These are very much my own perspectives on the issues from my own experience, and others will feel quite differently, I am sure, so please feel free to blog your own responses to these questions, or to add a comment below.

1. Which is the best site to go with--or does it make a difference?

Blogger is, I think, simpler to use and you can have your blog up in minutes. It is pretty efficient and is fine for what most people need from a blog. However, I do think WordPress is the superior product and I have very much enjoyed using it for the new NT Gateway and NT Gateway blog since I went into partnership with Logos for that site. For my NT Blog, I am fairly happy with blogger, which I have used since 2003. For the NT Pod, I went with blogger for the "shop front", as it were, though the audio files themselves are all located elsewhere, and I slightly regret that decision. Word Press is the superior product for podcasting, it seems to me.

2. I would like to blog about three things--Bible, ministry and Macs. Is it best to have three separate blogs?

Well, people feel differently about this one. I like to keep one blog for academic stuff and one for the rest (the Resident Alien) in which I talk about things connected with the life of a British expat in the US, and some other stuff of personal interest. I do this because I don't assume that people who want to read the academic stuff necessarily have any interest in things that happen to interest me, like The Prisoner, Doctor Who, and Abba. Similarly, there are those who are interested in some of that stuff but who could not care less about academic NT studies. But it's very much an individual thing. Some like to combine everything into one blog, and that clearly works for them and for their readers. My guess is that there will be those interested all three of those things, Bible, ministry and Macs, and so a one blog approach might be best.

3. What about name registration? I see you have stayed with having .wordpress but others have their own names for their blogs. Is this straightforward?

Well, we have retained ntgateway.com for the NT Gateway site, but yes, I have a .blogspot address for the NT Blog. I actually find hosting on blogger much easier than hosting on my own site. Blogger updates incredibly quickly. Holding all the archives on my personal space and publishing via FTP sometimes took a very long time. The most straightforward thing, I would say, is simply to publish on Wordpress or Blogger's own sites, and so to have a .blogspot or a .wordpress address. And the massive advantage there is that it is free!

Why blog?

Jim West has a forthright post on Blogging: To What End?, partly in response to my post Academic Blogging: Publication, Service or Teaching, itself in response to Stephen Carlson on Hypotyposeis. I have a few quick comments on Jim's post. First, I blog because I enjoy it and I know that some of my readers enjoy it. If I stopped enjoying it, or if my readers stopped enjoying it, I would stop doing it. The question about where to file it in an academic application is, I think, a reasonable one, but one's answer to that question is clearly not the same as one's answer to the question "Why blog?" Indeed, as I said in the recent post, I sometimes reflect that I could have got a lot more done (publications wise) without blogging or doing other web work. But I do that work because I enjoy it.

Second, I think that Jim is unfair to Jim Davila in this post and I would encourage him to rethink those comments.

Third, let me respond directly to the comments about me:

Mark Goodacre has subdivided his blogging life into a strictly ‘professional’ offering and a thoroughly ‘personal’. But again, why? Do the two worlds never intersect? Can any of us really subdivide our lives and compartmentalize them so thoroughly that we have a ‘professional’ and a ‘private’ life? And what does that say about our forthrightness?

The reason that I do this is that I have friends and family and other casual readers who are not interested in academic New Testament scholarship, but who enjoy reading my occasional posts over on The Resident Alien. Likewise, I do not presume that people who come to the NT Blog for material about Biblical scholarship will be interested in life as a British expat, Doctor Who, Abba or whatever else.  Of course the two worlds often intersect, which is why I sometimes cross-refer from one blog to the other. Other bloggers have made other decisions about posting on non-academic issues, and I have no problem with that. Each to his or her own.

The latter part of Jim's post suggests that James Crossley, Roland de Boer and a few others are "examples of honest academics" while a "legion" of others are engaging in dishonesty, hypocrisy and more. I think my own feeling is that the bloggers in our field are an honest bunch and I am sorry to see that Jim apparently thinks otherwise.

Academic Blogging: Publication, Service or Teaching?

Over on Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson asks the interesting question Academic Blogging: Publication or Service?

A friend of mine at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society (NAPS) reported that a speaker at a session on scholarly publishing observed that blogging tended to count more as service instead of publications for one’s academic career (read: tenure and promotion). On the face of it, this observation seems plausible--one’s web work does count, but not as a replacement for publishing. My questions are: is this really the case? and is this a good way to evaluate the role of blogging in conjunction with one’s academic career?

This is a question that I have occasionally discussed here, and it is one of interest to any of us who spend a lot of time blogging. Frankly, I do sometimes ask myself whether the time I spend blogging (or on the NT Gateway, or other web projects) would have been better spend writing more books and articles. But always, in the end, I decide that it is a worthwhile chunk of time, not least because blogging and web work occupy a space that overlaps with all the other elements in an academic's life, teaching, research and service. Its relevance for research and writing is obvious -- it is a place to develop one's ideas and to try out new things, often in discussion with others.  Scholarship is a communal and not a solitary activity, and blogging at its best can underline the communal nature of good scholarship.

In a previous discussion on this kind of topic, Should Blogs Count for Tenure?, I responded to the question of how I would assess applicants who were bloggers:

I know that I would always look favourably on someone who has an intelligent and energetic blog, whether as potential applicants to a graduate programme, or as job applicants, or as applicants for tenure. To me it is likely to suggest several things, a commitment to the dissemination of scholarship outside of the guild, a commitment to collaborative scholarship, and some degree of courage and public risk-taking. So I would be strongly inclined to treat blogging as a plus. I suppose that this is what Davidson means in her reference to blogging as fulfilling the all important "service to the guild" requirement for gaining tenure. [Context here] But I think that it is potentially much more than that. For one thing, blogs can be continuous with published work, so that the lines between publication and blog are blurred. In those cases, it's not a bolted on extra, but is integral to the research and publication process. One might even be using the blog as a means of developing published materials. There are multiple examples of this kind of thing as when people develop conference papers on-line and then use a blog as a means of doing research, gauging reaction and improving the output.

However, I think that now I would want to stress more the role that blogging can play in good teaching, as a place to discuss elements that come up in the process of teaching, to reflect on how things have gone, or to try out new ideas. I suspect that it is this latter category that actually weighs most strongly with appointment, promotion and tenure committees, and I would be inclined to stress this element in the obligatory category on "innovation" in teaching. A blog in which teaching methods and content is discussed is a demonstration of one's commitment to thinking through pedagogy.

The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers I: An Early Success

On Thursday this week I am giving a short presentation at the Duke Symposium on Archaeology, Politics and the Media: Re-Visioning the Middle East (Flyer). My topic is "The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers".  Naturally, I will be outlining my presentation here, with some hyperlinks to the relevant material.  In this first post, I would like to begin with an example of how blogging successfully held the programme makers to account and resulted in changes to the claims made.   Most of the links below are to the NT Blog where you can find further links to the relevant information, and you can get a feel for the original timeline, which on this occasion is important.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus was first broadcast across a two hour slot on Discovery Channel at 9pm on March 4 2007.  Several of us live blogged the event.  But by this point, Discovery's publicity machine had been in full force for several days;  there was a press conference, a snazzy "official" website and Discovery's own website.  The bloggers got to work on this informtion straight away and by the time the documentary had aired, there were already major question marks against the claims being made by Simcha Jacobovici and the other programme makers.

The case for the identification between the Talpiot Tomb and Jesus of Nazareth is based largely on statistics.  The cluster of names found in this tomb is said to correspond to a remarkable degree with the names of Jesus and his family.   Before the documentary had aired, I was highly sceptical of the statistical case, not least because it appeared to rely on a dubious identification between Mariamene and Mary Magdalene while at the same time failing to take seriously important contrary evidence, Judas son of Jesus, and ignoring the non-match Matia.

Simcha Jacobovici had hired a top statistician, though, and surely, he argued, his expertise should be taken seriously. The statistician in question was Dr Andrey Feuerverger, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Toronto. I wrote the following:

Clearly he knows a lot more about statistics than most of us, and I would not dream of trying to second guess him. But he revealed a very important piece of information at the press conference, that he is not an expert on the New Testament or archaeological data, so he was working with the data given to him by the programme makers. The relevance of this is that a significant and fatal bias was introduced into the analysis before it had even begun.

One can view the data that was given to Feuerverger on the Discovery website, in the PDF packet of documentation, where the grounds for the statistical analysis are given. It is clear from this that the task he was given was to work out the probability of a certain cluster of names occurring, where in each case all known examples of the given name in the given period were divided into all known naming possibilities in the given period. And the names he worked with were Jesus son of Joseph, Mariamne, Maria and Joseph. The name Matia was initially factored in too, and then removed "since he is not explicatively [sic] mentioned in the Gospels". But the problem is not just that Matia is not mentioned as a family member in the Gospels, it is that the greater the number of non-matches, the less impressive the cluster becomes. Or, to put it another way, it stops being a cluster of striking names when the cluster is diluted with non-matches. Mariamne needs to be taken out of the positive calculation and instead treated as a non-match; Matia needs to be treated as a second non-match; Judas son of Jesus needs to be treated as contradictory evidence. These three pieces of data together detract radically from the impressiveness of the given cluster.

In an attempt to make the point by extending and reapplying an analogy that Simcha Jacobovici was fond of, I continued:

At the risk of labouring the point, let me attempt to explain my concerns by using the analogy of which the film-makers are so fond, the Beatles analogy. This analogy works by saying that if in 2,000 years a tomb was discovered in Liverpool that featured the names John, Paul and George, we would not immediately conclude that we had found the tomb of the Beatles. But if we also found so distinctive a name as Ringo, then we would be interested. Jacobovici claims that the "Ringo" in this tomb is Mariamene, whom he interprets as Mary Magdalene and as Jesus's wife, which is problematic (see Mariamne and the "Jesus Family Tomb" and below). What we actually have is the equivalent of a tomb with the names John, Paul, George, Martin, Alan and Ziggy. We might well say, "Perhaps the 'Martin' is George Martin, and so this is a match!" or "Perhaps John Lennon had a son called Ziggy we have not previously heard about" but this would be special pleading and we would rightly reject such claims. A cluster of names is only impressive when it is a cluster that is uncontaminated by non-matches and contradictory evidence.

In short, including Mariamne and leaving out Matia and Judas son of Jesus is problematic for any claim to be made about the remaining cluster. All data must be included. You cannot cherry pick or manipulate your data before doing your statistical analysis.

That post appeared on Thursday 1 March.  (Actually I remember being up late that night to write it, and the time stamp of 1.45am confirms that memory).  Within 24 hours, I was able to publish a follow-up based on a helpful but technical email from Joe D'Mello who was concerned about some of the claims being made on the Discovery Channel website.  D'Mello was able to go much further than I, and others like me, were able to go.  We were largely questioning the data that had been fed to Feuerverger, but D'Mello could see that there were problems also in the interpretation of the statistical calculations.  D'Mello was disputing the following claim that appeared prominently on the Discovery Website:

A statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters (Discovery Channel/Vision Canada/C4 UK) concludes that the probability factor is 600 to 1 in favor of this tomb being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

D'Mello was clear that this conclusion was not justified by the data.  I invited him to write a guest post for me;  and he wrote to Feuerverger and Discovery.  Within two days, now the day of the broadcast itself, D'Mello had secured important corrections from Feuerverger, including the following:

In this respect I now believe that I should not assert any conclusions connecting this tomb with any hypothetical one of the NT family. The interpretation of the computation should be that it is estimating the probability of there having been another family at the time whose tomb this might be, under certain specified assumptions.

Again, I published the material here and again it was not the end of the story. By March 10, D'Mello had secured an agreement that there should be an adjustment on the Discovery website itself, a correction that duly appeared three days later, on 13 March, and then throughout the site by the end of the week, on 16 March. Perhaps the most significant of the changes was this one:

Dr. Andrey Feuerverger, professor of statistics & mathematics at the University of Toronto, has concluded a high statistical probability that the Talpiot tomb is the JESUS FAMILY TOMB.

changed to

Dr. Andrey Feuerverger, professor of statistics at the University of Toronto, has concluded (subject to the stated historical assumptions) that it is unlikely that an equally "surprising” cluster of names would have arisen by chance under purely random sampling.

It is easy to see that the second statement is significantly weaker than the first.

The discussion of the statistics continued for some weeks and months after this initial flurry of emails and posts, and I should make special mention of the work of Randy Ingermanson, who was involved in the discussions right from the beginning and went on to write what I think of as the definitive piece on the subject, Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger's Article on the Jesus Family Tomb. But I have homed in in this post on the early contributions of Joe D'Mello, and the discussions of the statistics in this blog, because it illustrates one of the upsides of the blogs. By providing informed comment in an up-to-the-minute way, the blogs can, on occasions like this, hold the media to account, exposing problematic claims and faulty logic. It was, I think, the combination between speed and accuracy that made the impact. The reactions were speedy, at the very time that the eye of the media was upon us, and when Discovery wanted to avoid criticism. The reactions were informed and accurate, the blogging revolution allowing connections to be made between Biblical scholars and statisticians.

In the next part, I will turn to the broader picture of the blogging of the Talpiot Tomb, and how it had success in changing the scene.

The Ethics and the Practicalities of Blogging in the wake of the Raphael Golb affair

The fall-out from the Arrest of Raphael Golb is still making the news and it is being covered well by Jim Davila on Paleojudaica and Jim West, both of whom comment on Norman Golb's remarkable defence in Ha'aretz:

“Raphael, my son, is very devoted to my research. He realized years ago that there was an effort to close the door on my opinions. And so he started debating bloggers who were against me, using aliases. That’s the custom these days with blogs, as I understand it,” Norman Golb said.

Since I am not an expert on the scrolls, I generally avoid blogging on the topic, but the fall-out from this affair now touches on the ethics and practicalities of blogging and blog-commenting. (For full and detailed coverage, see Bob Cargill's constantly updated Who is Charles Gadda? web page).

When academics unfamiliar with the blogosphere comment on this world, they often -- unsurprisingly -- have a skewed picture. As Jim West and Jim Davila comment, Golb's view quoted above is seriously mistaken. There is no such accepted convention about the use of aliases and anyone who uses them in the way allegedly adopted by Raphael Golb is engaging in unacademic, uncivil and completely unacceptable behaviour. For those of us familiar with academic blogging, this goes without saying, but for others it may be less clear, and it is therefore worth underlining.

There is a practical problem here with the issue of blog-commenting, not least because Raphael Golb is alleged to have used multiple aliases in commenting on blogs, including my own (under the names Charles Gadda, Suzanne Shapiro and on one occasion as Anonymous, concerning the disgraceful slur on Schiffman, which I deleted). I have had commenting available on this blog almost from the beginning and on the whole the benefits outweigh the problems. Nevertheless, recent events highlight the problems quite starkly. I insist on people adding their names in comments, but what this affair shows is just how easy it is to adopt an alias and post something. In the light of this, it is easy to see why some do not allow comments and why others moderate them very heavily. I am certainly going to be much more careful in future.

The story continues in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, only available, unfortunately, to subscribers and subscribing institutions. The whole article is the best piece yet on the debacle, clear, detailed and well-narrated, and it appears now that Norman Golb admits that his son is indeed Charles Gadda (and so by implication these other aliases too):

Norman Golb told The Chronicle that he was "aghast and horrified at these charges. My son's only interest has been to follow my work, and—since he is a blogger and I am not a blogger—to engage in debate with other bloggers." The elder Mr. Golb added, "He used a pseudonym because that's what he preferred to do."

When a Chronicle reporter asked if that pseudonym was Charles Gadda, the older Mr. Golb replied, "Yeah, that's right."

The sad thing about the case is that engaging in debate is just what did not happen. Essentially, the multiple aliases were used to promote and not to debate. And it is difficult to engage in proper debate with a series of apparently different identities that all emanate from the one person.

The Chronicle article goes on to talk briefly about how scholars should be involved on the web. "Mr. Schiffman believes that descending into the fray on Web forums is a fool's errand," the article says, but Jodi Magness was also interviewed:

"We have a responsibility to disseminate our information to the wider public," she said. "The fact of the matter is that many people now get their information from the Internet, so we do have a responsibility to make what we find out known."

But while the Web allows scholars to engage the public directly, Ms. Magness said it is "not a suitable venue for the dissemination of unvetted scholarly interpretations."

I strongly agree with what Jodi says about our responsibility to disseminate our scholarship, and I agree too, in the spirit of the second quotation here, that we need to keep thinking about how best we do this. Where the blogs are concerned, the very informality and immediacy of the medium provide the opportunity to try out fresh ideas or to engage creatively with published material. Those of us actively involved in the blog world need to make sure that the abuse of the medium is not allowed to provide a reason for avoiding intelligent use of the medium.

A coda. The article has a further remarkable quotation from Norman Golb to the following effect:

At the same time, the elder Mr. Golb said he thinks "there should be tighter rules in general for bloggers so that everyone would have to have his own identification—bona fide identification."

This reminds me of Tony Blair's response to the "Cash for Coronets" scandal in the dying days of his premiership, with the suggestion that new rules were required to help the parties to avoid corruption. Legislating the bloggers is not only an absurd idea from a logistical point of view, it is also entirely the wrong reaction to the abuse of the bloggers' and blog-commenters' relative freedom. We don't need new rules. We need ethical behaviour.

Declaring Blog-Reading Bankruptcy

I recently caught mention of the idea of declaring email bankruptcy on AKMA's Random Thoughts. The idea comes from Lawrence Lessig, and a little googling shows it to be a popular idea. Many, including AKMA, post links to a blog post on the topic at 43 Folders. I am so extraordinarily behind in my emailing at the moment, that this is something of an attractive thought. But the problem is that by doing so, I would be effectively rejecting many of the most interesting, longer term, less urgent emails, the kind that require slightly longer replies. The tyranny of the urgent is particularly pressing for university lecturers and professors, especially where one has students with deadlines. At Duke, our undergraduates are very bright, highly motivated and most ambitious, but such things just add to their levels of anxiety and stress, and they are emailing me like crazy this week. I naturally prioritise talking to my students, and other things are going by the wayside. I was already rather behind, but this has thrown me way off.

I wouldn't, I couldn't declare email bankruptcy, though. If people have taken the time to email me personally, they deserve a reply. (Well, some don't on account of their rudeness and presumption, but they are in the minority). And I enjoy correspondence. It's just that I now feel like it is all I do in every spare moment. I can't imagine how I ever used to be able to keep up with academic e-lists, much less contribute to them. Others presumably feel the same way since many of the e-lists continue to die their very slow death. But if not email bankruptcy, what about blogging bankruptcy? Being underneath the email mountain prevents me from getting to the Blog Reader, and waiding through the (academic) blogroll when one has been away for days simply prolongs the opportunity to post oneself even longer. So I am declaring blog-reading bankruptcy today, something that is very easy to accomplish; I click on my Blog Reader's header (I use Google Reader), and "Mark all as read", and several thousand blog posts happily vanish, the vast majority of them never to be seen again by me.

There comes a slight feeling of guilt with this declaration, however. Why should I expect anyone to read my posts when I have just sent theirs off into oblivion? Well, if this post is one of those that vanishes from readers while others, like me, are declaring blog-reading bankruptcy, then I am delighted to be sharing the experience with you. And no doubt the best blog posts will still somehow rise to the surface in the coming months as people continue to discuss them and link to them.

So, here's starting fresh and looking forward to a clean blog-roll, and rebooting my blog. Incidentally, I had always assumed that the term "blog-roll" had the same ring to all ears, reminding one of "bog-roll", and so a little disparaging in the association it conjurs up, but it occurred to me while writing this post that "bog-roll" is British slang and that I have not heard anyone use the expression here in the US.

I am not thinking of giving up blogging

I just want to clarify, in relation to my post about How access to the internet interferes with writing, that I wouldn't dream of giving up blogging, with thanks to comments on Ricoblog and Jim West. I love it, and will continue to do it even if my readership goes down to a handful. Attempts to streamline my use of the internet are more about resisting the urge to follow up every small reference, to satisfy every curiosity as it arises online, to provide full, detailed and speedy responses to every single email received, and so on. Like housework, another thing that occupies far too much of my time, internet usage will always expand to fill the time available, and for academics that means that it seeps into one's writing time and crowds it out. At its best, academic blogging aids the writing task, whether by giving one the opportunity to develop ideas, to engage with others over work in progress, or in getting involved in what's going on in the area. The danger that I see with the internet is not those things but rather that it is ever present, always giving the impression of unexplored territory, ready to provide me with answers to questions I happen to be bothered about at any given point in time.

I think broadband is to blame. When I began writing The Case Against Q in the late 1990s, I was on a dial-up connection, and it was easier to impose discipline. I would just look up my references when I was next in the library, for example. Now, it is too easy to go and check them out straight away, and for one reference to lead one to another article I had not realized existed and so on. None of this is problematic in itself; it is just that the broadband era requires a great deal more discipline in writing practices, at least for me. I liked James McGrath's comment on my previous post, which I will repeat here, a great tip for graduate students and for easily distracted academics:

Your point about not looking up every last reference is also a good one. A nice trick I learned from my doctoral supervisor Jimmy Dunn is to put a sign $$$ in those places where one needs to go back and add a reference or further information. Since that sign has no other use, you just go back later and search for $$$ and track down the missing references then. It is a good way of keeping the writing flowing, even when one could theoretically stop and look for the needed citation.

Blogging to market your book: don't

On Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight has a great post on Blogs: A Word for Authors, with a strong prohibition: "If you have written a book, don’t create a blog to market your book". I have been asked the question by authors too, "I'm thinking of starting up a blog to get some feedback on my book", etc., and invariably the person asking the question is not a consumer of blogs, something that is unlikely to lead to successful blogging. If you solo-blog, i.e. don't interact with any other blogs, you simply won't get much attention anyway, unless, I suppose, you are a huge name. An N.T. Wright blog or a Bart Ehrman blog would, I'm sure, get some attention.

One qualifier, though, to Scot's remarks. It is quite possible for someone to begin a blog in connection with a publication, and then to move on from there. And that is one of the keys of successful blogging, to let your blog evolve. I may be wrong, but I think that James Tabor's Jesus Dynasty Blog began as a venue for information and discussion on Tabor's book The Jesus Dynasty, but it has evolved into a blog that discusses a variety of other issues related to Tabor's research, and it's one I always enjoy reading.

Blogging and Tenure 2

On Sunday I posted on the topic Should Blogs Count for Tenure? in response to Cathy Davidson's post of that title on Hastac. Kathy Asselin, a graduate student at Wayne State University, gets in touch as a result of that post, and asks if I would respond to four questions. I am answering them here:

1. How would you define the term blogging?

On occasions like this, I tend to have a look on Wikipedia to see if the multiple users there have come up with a good definition that might nicely encapsulate blogs and blogging, and on this occasion I am not disappointed:

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term "blog" is a portmanteau, or, in other words, a blend of the words web and log (Web log). "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

I would be foolish to try to improve on that.

2. What blogs-- including academic, institutional, corporate, business, or personal--do you currently participate in?

I am the author of this blog (NT Gateway Weblog), which has been running for three and a half years. It is an academic blog focusing primarily on academic New Testament teaching and research. Although my employer's name appears in the heading, it is not sponsored by my employer and is hosted on my own server. Since it is an academic blog, I try to avoid straying into personal interests, and I try to avoid commenting on issues on which I have no expertise. I do occasionally discuss issues of general interest in higher education since I see those as relevant to the general context of the blog.

I also guest post occasionally (approximately every week or two) on my wife's blog, The Americanization of Emily, which is a more of a personal / family blog in which we reflect on the experience of being a British family living in America. Come to think of it, this provides a useful illustration of the general point. I would never mention this blog in professional academic materials, CV etc., because of its personal, non-academic nature. It is a quite different thing from an academic blog in spite of the fact that it belongs in the same broad genre (blog).

3. How could blogs be utilized in education?

This is a huge question. We are only at the beginnings of seeing how massive blogs will become in education. Imagine someone saying in 1994, "How could the internet be utilized in education?" and that's the kind of stage we are at. Many university teachers are already using blogs successfully in their teaching. An example in our area is Jim Davila at the University of St Andrews who is currently running the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Blog in association with a course he is teaching. I have not experimented with that yet myself, though I do often blog about topics related to my teaching, and write sketches of things I will be teaching, or write notes and reflections on things I have taught, all of which help to improve the quality of my course offerings -- I hope.

A blog can be hugely helpful in one's research, in developing one's ideas, in engaging directly with others, in disseminating research and so on. I suppose one of the ways in which I find it particularly useful is in the live interaction that blogging generates. When I publish an article, I have to wait months (at least) and years before I receive published responses, and frequently those responses do not engage in detail with the case (you know, a footnote here, a citation there). And by the time that the published reactions to one's published works comes in, one is already working on other things, and one's mind is sometimes elsewhere. I am overstating the point, but I hope you see what I am saying. Academic blogging, on the other hand, allows you to get feedback and to interact while you are at the stage of developing and articulating your ideas, while the topic is fresh, interesting and lively and while you have the energy to pursue it with others. I see this as a major step forward in the academic life, and especially in taking forward the extra mural vision of the best universities and the most conscientious scholars. This is a point I could talk and talk and talk about, and no doubt I will return to it on this blog in the future.

4. Is it possible that online publications such as blogs could be used in developing a new metric in determining tenure for assistant professors and promotion -- which include higher ranks as well-- at university?

This is the question that began my interest in this topic, having read Cathy Davidson's answer. My first answer is here in Should Blogs Count for Tenure? but I hope to comment a little more in due course, partly in response to others who have commented on the question and who are less positive than I about the possibilities. At this point, let me just summarise my thoughts by saying the following: Appointments, Promotions and Tenure Committees, if they are doing their job thoroughly, should be looking at all aspects of a candidate's academic career. If a given candidate has a successful, well respected academic blog, to which s/he had drawn attention in the documentation, that candidate has a right to expect the committee to take it seriously and, if the academic quality is indeed strong, for it to be favourably regarded in the application. I suspect that in years to come we will be surprised that we even found ourselves asking the question, in the same way that now no one would seriously entertain doubts about drawing attention to well constructed academic websites in one's applications for appointments, promotions and tenure.

Should Blogs Count for Tenure?

Over on Hastac, my Duke colleague Cathy Davidson provides some answers to the interesting question, "Should Blogs Count for Tenure?". The gist of her response is that they can make an important contribution to academic service, typically one of the three pillars on which tenure stands, the others being teaching and research. She adds that there may be a contribution to teaching too, depending on the nature of the blog and the teaching. Turning to research, she asks:

Is it research? Depends entirely on the nature of what is blogged. And since the whole point of blogging is to avoid refereeing, to be able to get out one’s ideas unmediated, the scholarly definition of research as a peer-reviewed, refereed contribution to knowledge is not fulfilled by blogging. Definitionally these are opposites.

I think there is something in these comments, but I am not sure that I would see "the whole point of blogging" as "to avoid refereeing". In some respects, I think blogging can hold one up to a higher standard of refereeing than published work because there are so many more people who are commenting on one's ideas and thoughts as they are in process. It is an inherently more risky process than the much more sedate and private world of peer review. Of course I agree about the importance of peer review, but I don't think I see blogging as being at the opposite end of the spectrum as this. Rather, it's a different kind of peer review, with its own strengths and weaknesses (Davidson later notes that it is peer reviewed "in a Web 2.0 way" but I think that that short-sells it). Prof. Davidson goes on:

In fact, it makes me suspicious when someone protests that their blog gets so many hits while their scholarly articles receive so many fewer and therefore they don't need to publish in order to get tenure. That fails logically. Tenure is an agreed upon system of accountability and reward, as fallible as any such system and as susceptible to abuse.

If someone is making comments like that, then they need a serious reality check because frankly they are not going to get tenure with an attitude like that. But I know that I would always look favourably on someone who has an intelligent and energetic blog, whether as potential applicants to a graduate programme, or as job applicants, or as applicants for tenure. To me it is likely to suggest several things, a commitment to the dissemination of scholarship outside of the guild, a commitment to collaborative scholarship, and some degree of courage and public risk-taking. So I would be strongly inclined to treat blogging as a plus. I suppose that this is what Davidson means in her reference to blogging as fulfilling the all important "service to the guild" requirement for gaining tenure. But I think that it is potentially much more than that. For one thing, blogs can be continuous with published work, so that the lines between publication and blog are blurred. In those cases, it's not a bolted on extra, but is integral to the research and publication process. One might even be using the blog as a means of developing published materials. There are multiple examples of this kind of thing as when people develop conference papers on-line and then use a blog as a means of doing research, gauging reaction and improving the output.

One of the underlying issues here may be the undue stress placed on peer-review in the American tenure system. I am new to this system, and the word "tenure" is only known in the UK as something American academics talk about, but it may be that it is important for appointments, promotions and tenure committees to think about peer review as only one, albeit important element in reviewing a scholar's output. Why not look more widely to what are called "esteem indicators" in the UK, and think of strong, successful academic blogging as one of those "esteem indicators"?