Writing History in the Digital Age (archived site)

Popular History, the Academy & the Internet (Jarrett) Fall 2011

Popular History, the Academy and the Internet: Blogging History for New and Old Audiences (Fall 2011 version)

by Jonathan Jarrett

See 2013 final edition from the University of Michigan Press

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Introduction:
A book I had open before writing this essay opens, like many, with an assertion that the desire to know about the past is a human universal.¹ There are exceptions, one imagines, but the audience for history is certainly wider than just the academic discipline. We see this in the market for books about the past: people buy our books whom we are not teaching and who are not working on our subject, even if not always many. The Internet, however, offers this validation faster and harder. The deeper meaning of page-views and click-throughs may be impossible to divine but the readership of an essay posted in a blog and its bulk compared to the likely readership for a piece in a journal or essay collection is impossible to miss.²

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The temptation to access this audience is therefore considerable, and the following piece discusses, on the basis not least of five years’ blogging experience, the potentials of doing so and their limits.³

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 1. Blogs and websites:
The web is ever-changing, of course; attempts to sum it up date quickly. If I write at length now about Web 2.0, interactivity and crowd-sourcing, I may look a fool in ten years if this essay is still up but Facebook and Twitter have evaporated. It is worth, nevertheless, trying to stake out what makes blogs different from other forms of websites, already studied elsewhere.⁴

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 There are of course many ways in which all online writing is similar: the size of screens and attention spans of readers dictate brevity, or are thought to, and technical issues such as browser capability are an unwelcome consideration. On the positive side, the hyperlink offers the online reader instant passage to citations, and to the creative writer the subtext that hypertext can carry allows wry allusions and the deliberate double-edging of basic statements (for example, silently linking a mention of a police agency to a report on deaths in their custody).

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Another characteristic shared by all online material is that it exists in a limbo of semi-permanence. On the one hand, websites disappear as their host changes internet access or host institution or redesign evolves old content out. Few links from ten years ago remain valid now, even if the content is still online. Funding for projects is withdrawn, staff cease to be available to maintain pages, and so forth; every reader of this piece will be able to think of examples. On the other hand, that which is assumed to be transient may not be: deletion at source may not be soon enough to keep an ill-considered screed from Google‘s cache, and the Internet Archive‘s mission to preserve the disappearing web also contains the implication of preserving such mistakes, forever. Of course, the Internet Archive’s web-spiders are far from instantaneous, and even its funding is not secure, so one cannot entirely rely on it for permanence. Nothing is safely online in the long-term, but not much is certainly lost either, an awkward halfway house for an academic culture raised on citeability.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 8 2. Blogs versus websites
A blog may of course fulfil most if not all of the functions of a website, and the availability of free and well-featured blogging platform sites like Blogger or WordPress makes it easier than ever before for anyone to start putting content onto the web. Nonetheless, the format has implications. Unless, working against the grain, this feature is switched off, new content added to a blog will be in the form of a dated, separate, ‘post’, which will be arranged on the site so as to display the most recent content first. This is obviously unsuitable for some endeavours: if one is putting online parts of a larger study, for example, firstly it will appear in reverse order to the new reader, and secondly it will only be linked up to the other parts if one has deliberately done this either at post or structure level. Does one then, with the twenty-sixth letter in a collection, go back and add links to it by editing each of the previous twenty-five individually, thus updating them all and dumping them afresh upon the unwary subscriber? Does a necessary part of each post become a long string of links elsewhere? This would be better and quicker done with a purpose-built static website.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 Further, the dated and novelty-sorted nature of a blogpost has implications. Firstly, it is much easier for the casual visitor to see if a site is moribund when it is cast in blog format. Information on a blog not updated for a year carries its own implicit accuracy warning, although a static site might display such information, and it still be true, with continuing apparent relevance. Secondly, the format affects the content, or at least reader’s expectations of the content. A blog is designed to be current, up-to-the-minute and immediate. It is also designed to be transient: content will move down or off the front page as more is generated, and again navigation has to be built in to retain accessibility to older material. This vies with the traditional mode of academic publishing in which the ideal piece of writing is considered, definitive and permanent.⁵

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 5 There is also the fact that most blogging platforms are set up to receive comments from readers. Again, this can be switched off, but the expectation of a readership will be that they can leave comments, and that these comments will be publically visible with the blog-post. A readiness to receive comments, however, implies a readiness to revise one’s thinking and even content. This is of course not alien to academic practice, although I remember a story told with horror of a teacher’s very senior colleague who would hand the chairman a printed copy of his paper after speaking at a seminar, thus implying to my interlocutor that nothing in it could possibly need changing – but it is, at least in opposition to our mode of publication in which, to an extent, the fixed nature of print keeps us accountable for our expressed views. Contrariwise, while the ethical blogger will indicate where they have edited their words, nothing but conscience compels this of them.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 3. Why Blog?
Before going further into the possibilities and implications of the medium of blogging, something ought to be said about its nature and the ways it has come to be approached. A choice to write a blog may be based on little more than convenience, but may be made for specific reasons. In my case, when I was first asked to express my thinking about this choice, I invoked a wish to see my work more quickly presented than possible via print, a feeling that being funded from a public purse meant that I should make myself available as a public resource, and a wish to store thoughts and references in a way that submitted to electronic search. This last, of course, could have been done offline, so one presumes that I also desired an audience with whom I could engage directly, even if I did not express this desire in 2008. ⁶ Others have been more open about that desire, as well as seeing in the blog format the possibility of conducting an intellectual discourse about subjects not within our main fields of study. The blog here functions as a kind of commonplace-book-cum-opinion-column.⁷ Other bloggers have seen a need to inform the public about how historians see the past, so as to combat its misuse.⁸ Another intent may be to disabuse a reading public about the nature of the academic life.⁹ The purposes of the historian’s blog may, in short, be nearly as various as historians themselves, but in as much as we can be classified together at all, there are things that can be said about what we can all do with this format.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 7 4. Readers, wanted and unwanted
A blog is a pointless exercise without an audience, as one could achieve the same results with a word processor, but audience is not easy either to attract or to restrict.¹⁰ The content that the writer provides is a filter of sorts; it gives the search engines (if one grants them access) something to use to present the blog to enquirers, but it may also be very different from what those parties were actually seeking. ¹¹ An actual audience of readers, and far fewer commentators, will nonetheless slowly find a site, usually through links from others, and then become a consideration for the writer. This audience is not uniform, and can be categorised. The question arises with each, what can they get from a historian’s blog?

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 4 (A) Non-Academics and Non-Scholars
For those who are not engaged in scholarship but have an interest in the material under discussion, a blog may offer the voice of an expert, an intercession with scholarship for those who feel, for one reason or another, that they cannot participate themselves. This can be used by writers as advertising for the academic endeavour as a whole, for the field of history large or small or as a chance to correct misapprehensions, but it also requires a reciprocal attempt to engage at an accessible level, keeping terms of art and assumptions of knowledge down, as well as generosity and tolerance in responding to comments. In more social terms, this audience also allows us to demonstrate that (some) academics are approachable and useful human beings, while for the writer, it can provide a much-needed sense of wider relevance.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 (B) Amateur Historians and Academics from Other Disciplines
Persistent readers of a historical blog, however, unless that blog is fairly simplistic, will likely be found more among those who can deal with academic discourse, whether this be because they have a related research interest or because they are academically active in another area whose training they can deploy here. One part of this audience may come from one’s own scholarly peers, of course, but their response to and use for the blog presents different issues from that of the amateur or non-expert research-active. For the latter class of reader, the academic blogger can help decode the field, cherry-picking interesting work from a jungle of things of which non-historians can’t always get hold. Here, blogs can help keep interested people informed in a world where history would otherwise lose such an audience because of the commitments required by dedicated study and reading. Such writing also helps circumvent the economic exclusion, not just of those not enrolled in a course of study but also those without subscription access to print or electronic resources.¹²

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 1 (C) Peers
Any academic blogger who believes that their peers are not able to find things on the Internet is in for a nasty surprise, especially if those hings are mentions of their names! Ineluctably, some academics who know the blogger’s field will find them. Sometimes these will comment, but one cannot assume an absence of readership from an absence of comments. This kind of readership can in the end be the most useful, but is also the most dangerous.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0         (i) Peer disapproval
The dangers are partly in the medium and the expectations thereof, but also partly in the reaction of the Academy to non-traditional publication. Is a colleague (or worse, a potential colleague…) wasting time by blogging, or are they doing something valuable? Opinions vary.¹³ As long as outreach work is not measured alongside research output, research-intensive institutions may have little choice but to deprecate such activity. Of course, some projects come with a requirement for public engagement, and the increasing emphasis seen in the UK for making explicit the social ‘impact’ of one’s research may lead there to greater interest in quantifiable measures of public engagement, such as page-views.¹⁴ The corresponding emphasis in the USA on what has been called third-stream work, engaging not just students or peers (the first and second streams) but also the wider public, ought to be kinder to such endeavours, but may also therefore seek to orchestrate them more closely.¹⁵ At base, institutional perspectives vary substantially even within these wider environments, and are formed by individual ones that do so even more. The implication is therefore that, however carefully-written and sourced it may be, blogging is never more than an opinion, or at best a kind of journalism. Whether or not this be true, some of the academic audience may see it as a distraction from proper academic enterprises. One does not to have to agree with the argument to see how it might be constructed.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 A classic and controversial statement of this point of view was provided in a pseudonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005. The author, ‘Ivan Tribble’, recorded with scorn the damage that various applicants for a post in Tribble’s institution had done their applications by mentioning their blogs, which exposed them in various ways as unsuitable in the eyes of the selection committee.¹⁶ It is perhaps worth being clear that blogging can have these dangers, because there will continue to be readers like Tribble and colleagues. Blogging encourages an informal tone, because dense writing deters an audience and is hard to produce often enough to keep a blog fresh. This can obviously become excessive, in such forms as  name-dropping, character assassination, or professional gossip (though there has been plenty of this!¹⁷), all of which may obviously offend or misrepresent peers. That in turn may force retractions, meaning the undoing of work and adding to the transience of the blog, and worse, it may prompt professional complaints or even legal action. These are heavy consequences for killing some time online.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Another kind of unwitting revelation that may be perpetrated before an academic audience is that of the blogger’s identity. With the kind of concerns expressed above about the consequences of blogging on their minds, a great many academic blogs proceed under a pseudonym. To such writers an unpleasant choice is presented, either never to talk about their work directly and to avoid anything that might offer a search engine grip on their precise subject, or else to accept that the point will come when someone who knows the field will be aware who, for example, a female blogger writing in the UK on Carolingian masculinity must be, to pick one who is explicitly aware of the problem.¹⁸ The tension between being able to write freely and being able to write without so much risk is a live one that is repeatedly discussed by such bloggers.¹⁹ If the wish to remain anonymous is paramount, an obvious way to go wrong is thus to talk about one’s job, but to depersonalise anything one places online makes it very difficult to say anything of moment or with apparent basis.²⁰

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0         (ii) Collaboration
Sometimes, of course, an exchange online can lead to new understanding and collaboration. There can also be genuinely useful discussions of broad themes and specific cases between knowledgeable people.²¹ All this is an obvious, and perhaps the greatest, potential of the medium. For it to be achieved, however, the readership must already be present, and reading frequently; a discussion that stretches over months or years is unlikely to add much to understanding. Having that readership requires that the blog be an established and reliable presence, which will have occurred largely for other reasons.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 5. Blogging as Scholarship
This formulation, at least, finds the blog a scholarly purpose as a research tool, a kind of virtual workshop or college. The larger question remains, however, and has hung over this essay throughout: can blogging itself be academic output? Should we be doing our scholarship this way; is that even possible?

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 The hugest problem with that ideal is that blogging is essentially self-publication, and as such escapes traditional peer review. This enables its great virtues of speed and freshness, but adds problems of credibility. Experiments are being conducted with a view to making the format admit of peer review, both by reviewing blog contents externally or using open blogs for review of off-blog publications.²² The former of these loses the advantage of speed and currency, which are much of the point of the format, and the latter requires a substantial and committed readership that must, a priori, be recruited somewhere else, what essentially precludes it for ventures without an established online base. It might be argued that a kind of peer review functions through comments, but what then can be said of the post that has attracted no comments, with which indeed this essay must so far number itself? Even if eventually reviewed, the unreviewed version will be widely cached by search engines, and perhaps even read, before any suggested changes are implemented. More rigorous measures are therefore needed to convince doubters, and while here also a few years may make these comments look very short-sighted, at the current time the means to do peer-reviewed blogging have not been credibly created.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 To continue to insist on blogging and online writing in general as academic work thus requires a much more radical shift of position. The recent volume Hacking the Academy has one or two statements of such a case.²³ David Parry,  especially, urges his readers:

Given the cost of producing knowledge and the fact that academic journals or academic presses could only afford to produce so many pages with each journal, peers are established to vet, and signal that a particular piece is credible and more worthy than the others. This is the filter-then-publish model. But the net actually works in reverse—publish-then-filter—involving a wider range of people in the discursive production. Why do academics argue for small panel anonymous peer review? One thing we know is diversity of perspective enriches discourse.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 1 We have to give up being authorities, controlling our discourse, seeing ourselves as experts who posses bodies of knowledge over which we have mastery. Instead we have to start thinking of what we do as participating in a conversation, and ongoing process of knowledge formation. What if we thought of academics as curators, people who keep things up to date, clean, host, point, and aggregate knowledge rather than just those who are responsible for producing new knowledge.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 This approach sounds energising, but it may be the energy of a Gotterdämmerung. If we give up being authorities, being experts, and hand joint responsibility for knowledge creation to those outside the Academy, however egalitarian that may sound, we also give up any basis for people to treat our knowledge with any special respect, to credit us, in short, with expertise. In this hacked Academy, in fact, our output would actually have to be something like blogging, linking and commenting with frequency and insight but not contributing, merely facilitating.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 There are many functions to peer review, and some of them are insidious.²⁴ One, however, remains a primitive and restrictive sort provision of credibility, establishing a chain of trust that very digital concerns like encryption continue to require: our work is taken seriously, if it is, because others have decided it is worth taking seriously, and they have been allowed to decide that because others, in turn, have done the same for them, and so on. Without this chain of responsibility the worth of our output is not vouched for, and as yet, this process is not possible for blogging in isolation.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 2 In paradoxical short, therefore: I believe that blogging will only serve as a means of generating scholarship when there is no longer an apparatus to recognise scholarship. Blogging may contain scholarship, it may be about scholarship, but as a specific form it will not be where scholarship is done while the Academy exists in its current form. (Obviously this does not constitute a critique grosso modo of all open access or online publishing.)

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 6. The Form of the Content
The writing that one does for an academic blog is therefore freed of some constraints about form and apparatus, though one can indulge those if one chooses, and they will hopefully be recognised. Obvious considerations of this form of digital writing are length, density, register, language, frequency and group identity. Much Internet content is expected to be short: the acronym “tl;dr” (‘too long; didn’t read’) has arisen for use on those who contravene this expectation, but much academic material will only submit to so much compression. One must choose, to an extent, between breadth and depth. Similar considerations arise in more stylistic terms: the density of one’s prose may need to be limited and complicated words or structures minimised. An eye must also be kept on terms of art and what one blogger has called “the language that locks others out”.²⁵ Our material is complex, but whether the excuse of Plato that his learning was not comprehensible to those without years of study behind them is acceptable on the public Internet is doubtful.²⁶ Contrariwise, some demonstration of expertise is necessary to make one’s particular selling point obvious. This is another necessary compromise, decided, to an extent, by the kind of readers one wishes to keep.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 The frequency of posting is also a consideration. One’s readership will try to gauge how often one updates and check in accordingly, if they do not simply use a feed-reader to bring updates straight to them. The former implies that if one updates sporadically, it may be some time before one’s readership notices; the latter means that unless one updates, they never come to the blog. Maintaining an update schedule, however infrequent, nonetheless involves time commitments that may be hard to meet; communicating with one’s readership on such matters, even when they do not appear to be listening, is part of the maintenance of a blog necessary for it to operate as a community space. This can be what makes the blog worth writing, of course, but it also has the potential to derail a scholarly mission: if one starts writing to maximise or maintain the readership, considerations of accessibility arise that may disqualify academic writing and thus shed the more-or-less silent academic peer readership that the blog has.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 This all expressed, the audience of a blog is not a uniform body and can easily accommodate some variety of content; indeed, it may be wise for long-term retention of interest to provide that variety. Various people will come for different things but will continue through patches when those things are not being provided if there be reason to believe that they will be again.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 7. Blogging and Writing History
The current writer’s position, therefore, is that while blogging will not replace the writing of history, it has the potential to enliven and assist that writing a great deal. In the Sciences there exist organisations like Research Blogging that show how crowd feedback can be genuinely exploited for academic purposes.²⁷ In history, so far, the best we can manage is Reviews in History, but the two paradigms obviously contain some overlap and could be exploited.²⁸ This is a kind of interaction that the blog is well-suited for and is good at propagating. Collaborative spaces on the Internet may be better found on listservs and bulletin boards (such as indeed the Writing History in the Digital Age site where this essay took shape), but blogs have a rôle to play here.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 Another part of the reason for blogging is the potential of such interactive media to generate communities; it turns out that peers and indeed friends can be found simply by writing interesting things on the Internet! A well-maintained blog then has the potential to provide a crowd for crowd-sourcing, a forum for validation or advice, and a kind of collegiality that is no less real for being expressed in type. In this respect the so-called blogosphere can be seen as a set of continual, overlapping, conferences or symposia in an unusually large and friendly institution. Quite apart from the publicity value of having one’s name easily associable with well-written and immediately available scholarly-looking content, these are good reasons to blog, which the present writer discovered only after his initial mercenary aims had set him onto it.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 There are also other more internal reasons why blogging may help in the writing of history. To keep an active blog requires writing often, and this is good practice. Writing for non-academics is also practice. The variety in audience is good for the prose, good for clarity and may be good for employment elsewhere, if the impact or third-stream agendas acquire more force. Blogging, ultimately, involves a group of people writing and others commenting. Writing is central to the practice, but it encourages writing on different topics and in different ways. There is room in it for experiment and indulgence, but the words remain central. Where those words are deployed carefully, critically, and generously, blogging will remain vital because of the importance that it, as a furnishes such words and the people who work, and play, with them.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 About the author: Jonathan Jarrett is a Departmental Lecturer in Medieval History in the University of Oxford and a Career Development Fellow of the Queen’s College there. His interests lie in frontiers, documents and power, all of which he pursues especially in the tenth-century incarnation of what is now Catalonia. He is author of Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, and various papers and articles, and blogs at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe.