September 17, 2004

What I told the tenure committee

Here is a copy of a text I included among the myriad xeroxes and print-outs in my tenure file. I post it here for the edification of (or as a warning to) anyone else struggling with how, or if, to position their blogging within academe. I will post any updates if and when I receive feedback.

On the Value of Blogging for an Academic

During the process of preparing my tenure file I have thought long and hard about how (or even if) to position the work I do online. Course sites and weblogs (“blogs”) are obviously part of the dissemination of knowledge, while a weblog like Palimpsest, to which I contribute, seems pretty clearly some combination of service and professional development. But what about scribblingwoman, my weblog? I spend a lot of time on it; I run it from the UNB server; and on it, I identify myself professionally. But it does not feature traditional academic writing, or sometimes — I’m thinking of my penchant for links entries — any kind of traditional writing. And yet I remain convinced that keeping a weblog is becoming an increasingly important part of my persona as a scholar.

First, a quick definition of a blog. Blogging “A-lister” Meg Hourihan writes,

If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share — the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

… Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at.

… because it’s a weblog, formatted reverse-chronologically and time-stamped, a reader can expect it will be updated regularly. By placing our email addresses on our sites, or including features to allow readers to comment directly on a specific post, we allow our readers to join the conversation. Emails are often rapidly incorporated back into the site’s content, creating a nearly real-time communication channel between the blog’s primary author (its creator) and its secondary authors (the readers who email and comment).¹

Several weblog theorists (and yes, it is a vibrant and growing field, particularly in Scandinavia) have written about blog-writing as taking place at an earlier stage of the writing process; in other words, it is a place to work through material that may or may not appear in more polished, traditional form later. Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen write, in their foundational article “Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool”:

We are not positing that writing a weblog will change the articles we publish in scholarly journals. We do argue that blogging influences the way you think about thinking, and that it may change the process of research. To some extent it might even change the method.²

They go on to speculate about the parallels between the “blogosphere” and a Habermasian Public Realm comparable to coffeehouses and salons in the eighteenth century. I picked up on this idea — an idea which has a lot of play online, as one might imagine — for a workshop I recently gave called “Bloggers: the new public intellectuals” (UNBSJ, Sept. 1, 2004).

But why blog? Russel Arben Fox writes, as a comment on someone else’s post,

Blogging fills [the] desire [for self expression] nicely exactly because it is so vague and open-ended, a weird mix of news and private memos and creative writing and confession and scholarship, with varying degrees of insularity and publicness. Perhaps academics and journalists have especially taken to blogs exactly because they have to do so much writing, but aren’t for the most part ever truly settled or comfortable with the sort of writing they may be professionally obliged to do. Hence, blogging as a way to fill in our personal, random gaps.³

I would agree about the “weird mix,” though I have never viewed blogging as an escape from academic writing (which for my sins, I quite enjoy doing), but as something else again. I do sometimes work through ideas in my blog, but not as often as some. I am more likely to write informal mini-reviews of books I am reading, or post collections of links to various other sites, some scholarly and some not. My weblog is also a place where I discuss some of the challenges of being a mother and an academic, which if one were to categorize would fall into some creative, political and/or therapeutic category. But the point is not to categorize; the technology of weblogging, with its hyperlinks to other texts and its participation in a fluid and extensive conversation, can do things that traditional texts cannot. Some webloggers write essays and some write journal entries, and while these can be worthwhile and nicely done, to my mind the interest in weblogging lies in its possibilities and in the ways in which the online environment shapes the text and allows for conversations. Links entries are a case in point: they are not merely a collection of resources (however useful that may be in and of itself); rather, when well done, they can develop their own narrative, their own connections, perhaps unforeseen before the linker placed them in juxtaposition. To my mind, at least as I try to practice it, weblogging is a new and developing amalgam of the scholarly and the creative.

The next question that arises, then, is how (or even if) blogging might be regarded by a tenure and promotion committee. I’m not sure I can say much more than I already have, except to add that it might be helpful to regard permanent links from other weblogs as some form of peer-review, in that they are evidence of acknowledgment of worth. (A permanent link is a link to the main page of another weblog; it is usually positioned in a “blogroll” on the main page of the referring weblog. Permanent links imply blogs that are recommended and/or frequently visited. They are distinguished from transitory links within individual posts, usually to individual entries, which are analogous to footnotes and as such do not necessarily imply approbation.) I have included with this package a list of bloggers who have blogrolled me, as well as comments that several others have made about scribblingwoman. My blog is read by a small but far-flung community; according to my server stats I have readers on all continents (though of course the vast majority are from North America) and have had over 17,000 separate visits since Dec. 12, 2003, when I put in a counter. Mine is by no means one of the bigger blogs, or even one of the medium-sized ones — it is, in fact, a very modest little blog — but even so it is a small part of an ongoing discussion, the future directions of which are being determined as we go. And this discussion has spread beyond academic circles, unlike most of my other professional endeavors.

The only other thing I can say here is respectfully to request that the members of the committee visit scribblingwoman at unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt, look around, browse the archives, and be sure — and this is most important — to follow some of the links. I will be posting this text in the next day or two, and there may be some worthwhile comments …

¹ "What we’re doing when we blog" (13/06/02).

² Originally published in Researching ICTs in Context, ed. Andrew Morrison, InterMedia Report, 3/2002, Oslo 2002; available as a PDF file.

³ Part of a comment made in response to a post on 11D titled "Why Blog?." Fox blogs at In Medias Res.

Scribbled at September 17, 2004 04:17 PM AST | Hmmm? (4) | TrackBack (10) | Link Cosmos | More? academe, web/blogs




Here's what others have to say about What I told the tenure committee:

» Why Blog? from Dr. Gerald Lucas
Well, Scribblingwoman has a fairly good answer for her tenure committee, with references that I’ll probably need in a couple......[read more]
Tracked: September 20, 2004 01:48 PM

» Why Blog? from Dr. Gerald Lucas
Well, Scribblingwoman has a fairly good answer for her tenure committee, with references that I’ll probably need in a couple......[read more]
Tracked: September 20, 2004 03:22 PM

» Why Blog? from Dr. Gerald Lucas
Well, Scribblingwoman has a fairly good answer for her tenure committee, with references that I’ll probably need in a couple......[read more]
Tracked: September 20, 2004 03:22 PM

» Why Blog? from Dr. Gerald Lucas
Well, Scribblingwoman has a fairly good answer for her tenure committee, with references that I’ll probably need in a couple......[read more]
Tracked: September 20, 2004 03:24 PM

» Why? Because. from Liliputian Lilith
Scribblingwoman Has become a participant in the ongoing discussion about why one (especially if an academic) blogs. And she's doing so with a part of her tenure dossier! I love how this act of hers subverts that rather isolating process.......[read more]
Tracked: September 20, 2004 11:23 PM

» Bloggy links from GAIT News
Here are a few links I included in my bloggy talk for the Lunch 'n Learn series today... On: Liz Lawley's academic blog articles and examples (via scribblingwoman); Scribblingwoman's letter to her tenure committee, with links to her sources,......[read more]
Tracked: October 6, 2004 06:10 PM

» Bloggy links from GAIT News
Here are a few links I included in my bloggy talk for the Lunch 'n Learn series today... On: Liz Lawley's academic blog articles and examples (via scribblingwoman); Scribblingwoman's letter to her tenure committee, with links to her sources,......[read more]
Tracked: October 6, 2004 06:14 PM

» Blogs as publishing tools for tenure from Professional-Lurker: Comments by an academic in cyberspace
ScribblingWomen posted her letter to the Tenure Committee discussing her blog as academic writing, see What I told the tenure committee. Very interesting to think about how the new forms of communication may force changes in traditional academic system......[read more]
Tracked: February 15, 2005 04:38 PM

» an online conversation about academics who blog from Prof. Piderit
I'm posting a link here to my livejournal entry about the value of scholarly blogging because my livejournal doesn't allow trackbacks, but this journal does, and I want to note for Professor Lucas and Ms. Lilith that I have quoted their writing, which ......[read more]
Tracked: March 10, 2005 09:47 AM

» an online conversation about academics who blog from Prof. Piderit
I'm posting a link here to my livejournal entry about the value of scholarly blogging because my livejournal doesn't allow trackbacks, but this journal does, and I want to note for Professor Lucas and Ms. Lilith that I have quoted their writing, which ......[read more]
Tracked: March 10, 2005 09:58 AM