Ken Owen of “The Junto” fame has now weighed in on our Organization of American Historian’s panel “Is Blogging Scholarship.” Here is a taste:
The five bloggers on the panel all blog in different ways. John Fea pointed out that his model was that of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish; Historiann’s type of personal commentary is different and more regular than Mike O’Malley’s The Aporetic. USIH and The Junto, both group blogs, take different approaches to generating content, with USIH assigning their bloggers more specific assignments.
When categorizing content, we should note that blogging is not one thing. Fea’s style engages a different audience from The Junto’s fare, yet both clearly fit under the broadest category of ‘historical blogging’. The real innovation of blogging lies in the ease with which people can access the means of publishing, and the hope of generating an audience.
That is necessarily disruptive of a process of recognizing “scholarship” through very narrow channels indeed. And really, the amount of scholarly activity we all do as historians that doesn’t fit neatly into a dissertation/article/review/monograph model should be accounted for in a review process.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.