What Violent History Will Be, What It Will Not Be, How Often It Will Be, and Why
With my partner Hannah back in Maine for the week, I began this morning with a full mug of Fair Trade Viennese Cinnamon coffee (1 cream & 1 sugar-in-the-raw per cup) and the goal of plowing through a hefty backlog of student emails. Before checking my email, however, I opened up Firefox. Since StatCounter is one of my homepaged tabs, I had a look at the numbers, and was simultaneously frustrated and encouraged (and confused) by the fact that I am continuing to earn more than thirty unique visitors per day to this site. Largely by virtue of Mark Grimsley prematurely stumbling across my "maiden post" (see my earlier entry), this site has garnered a steady stream of visitors some two weeks before it was meant to be presented for public consumption. Since that time, and especially while staring at my site stats at 8 a.m. this morning after a half pot of coffee, I have felt the cumbersome obligation to post (and to post frequently and well) in order not to lose this accidental audience.
A bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios took the edge off my caffeine stress, and the daunting load of student emails helped rid me of the delusional obligation to my imagined fan club. But as I was replying to emails, I started to reflect on this feeling. I was frustrated with the fact that I had the good luck of this accidental audience and yet I was not posting frequently and well. In fact, with 560 pages of essays to grade last week, I posted neither frequently nor well. But who cares? Is the goal of this project really, as I seem to have constructed it in the back of my head, to post frequently and well? I wasn't even expecting to have a single reader outside my family and friends for months, and certainly not a few dozen total strangers per day in my first week.
By the time I was done with emails I had started to grapple with the important questions that I hadn't taken seriously before: "What is Violent History going to be?" "What won't it be?" Equally important in this particular up-to-the-second medium: "How often will it be?" And finally, the ultimate question: "Why?" Just as I was about to put all these thoughts to rest, adding them to the laundry list of Save as Draft notes to self of would-be posts, I got a phone call saying that the reserve readings for my grad seminar tomorrow got screwed up at the library and we had just one copy that would be left in the grad student lounge for people to wait in line for. With only a dim prospect of getting my hands on the reading until much later tonight, this seems as good a time as any to start dealing with these questions.
Let me start by saying that I don't feel it necessary to go into any detail about myself personally right now, or even into my particular interests as an historian. My academic pursuits will be a topic for another day, and my personal life is something that I suppose will unfold in layers over a long period of time, since it's not something I plan to put front and center here. What I want to talk about is how this project fits into the online community. While this is my first original content "blog" (a term I only grudgingly resign myself to use, because I have hated it and its spinoff puns and neologisms for years), I am fairly computer and web savvy. I've participated in a range a different online communities for over a decade, many of which fit to varying degrees within the alternative media genre that blogs supposedly now exemplify. I read an extensive amount of material from a wide range of sources in several languages online each day, and this includes a number of blogs. I even have a decent familiarity with the field of metablogging, the discussion of blogs by blogs. I think that this is a useful place to start, particularly for those few readers who are friends, family, and co-workers, most of whom don't know their blogosphere from their mesosphere.
While there have probably been the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of printed pages written on the topic of weblogs, very little has been written that I would ever recommend for anyone to read. Violent History exists at the intersection of the blogosphere (the world of weblogs) and academia, and fortunately this is a conjuncture that has produced some of the very best metablogging (discussion of weblogs, presumably by other bloggers, but I'm using the term loosely here). The best most recent discussion of blogging and the academy came in the latter half of 2005 in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In the July 8, 2005 article "Bloggers Need Not Apply", the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble fired the first shot of what would become a fierce debate over the job prospects of blogging grad students and untenured faculty. While he claims to recognize the potentially "legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum," Tribble focuses on his apparently horrifying experiences with "Professor Turbo Geek," "Professor Shrill," and "Professor Bagged Cat," all semifinalists in a faculty search at his college. His conclusions, though at times contradictory with respect to the importance of honesty and deceipt at various points in the application process, seem logical enough: don't exaggerate your qualifications, don't publicly disseminate rants about your colleagues and employers, etc. This would all be decent advice. As it turns out, however, it wasn't the bloggers but the googlers who were making inappropriate use of the internet. It appears that Professor Tribble & Co. only came to their damning conclusions about bloggers after putting in a substantial number of late nights scouring cached pages of material deleted by candidates (one would presume to protect their own privacy) and by stalking applicants across not only their own web pages but those of their friends. Mr. Tribble, it seems, is not the type of person who should be trusted with so much as an unsealed interoffice memo, and as such he doesn't belong in the position of courier, let alone search committee member at "Quaint Old College." A final testament to the unhelpful nature of Tribble's analysis is his paranoid dismissal of all weblogs, including the best and most professional among them, because "past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum."
This initial piece in the Chronicle sparked a firestorm of debate on the web, some of which made its way back into the publication's own pages. Most noteworthy of the blogged replies was that of Matthew Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English and Acting Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. His post, "Why I Blog Under My Own Name", is a very brief and very good reply to Tribble that places weblogs within the framework of the excellent (but massive) work of Philip Agre, "Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students". This is an important contribution not only to the blog debate but to Agre's volume on networking, which as of its 14 August 2005 formulation does not contain a single instance of the word "blog" or any of its variants. Kirshenbaum's blog was important enough to be referenced in a followup article by Tribble published in the Chronicle on September 2, 2005. That piece, "They Shoot Messengers, Don't They?", apparently scuttles the more ridiculous portions of Tribble's thesis by gleaning it down to the truism "be careful what you say" and wondering "why is it so controversial to add the word 'online'"? What remains is the same uninsightful, unhelpful original piece in its now unprovocative reformulation, that is noteworthy only because it is a necessary segue into the following excellent rebuttal.
"Do Not Fear the Blog" was written by Rebecca Goetz for the November 15, 2005 Chronicle. Before going any further, I want to congratulate Rebecca (whose (a)musings of a grad student is one of my favorite history websites), for winning a tenure track position! I should also point out that I refer to Rebecca by first name not because I know her (I don't) but because I detest referring to people by their last names-- a cold and impersonal practice of deference that was unfortunately abolished only incompletely by the American Revolution (yet another topic for a future post). In addition to Rebecca, the pseudonymous history blogger Another Damned Medievalist received similarly good news this weekend (and has since accepted the position). These brief asides actually underscore the legitimacy of Rebecca's rebuttal in the Chronicle. Though it deserves to be read in its entirety, some highlights are the emphasis on emerging communities of scholars in "carnivals" (the equivalent of online academic journals for bloggers) and the importance of blogging as both a resource and an outlet for those battling through the dissertation phase of their graduate work. "In short," she concludes, "I find that blogging makes my work better. What isn't to like about that?"
The experiences of Rebecca and ADM are certainly not universal. Last month saw the withdrawal of Indiana University Law School professor Jeff Cooper's weblog, Cooped Up. "The Amazing Disappearing Blog: Parts One, Two and Three" is a model for how to make a graceful exit, and it is as important as Rebecca's CHE article in considering whether or not to participate in this community.
By way of this very long introduction, I find myself back at the beginning. What is it that I intend to do here? To quote Ivan Tribble:
Fair enough. There are websites I have come across that I do not personally find useful to me. Included in a longer list of posts on academia and weblogs that I didn't have space to discuss here was this one by New Kid on the Hallway, a tenure track medievalist at a small liberal arts college. I found this post very useful, and I check by her site once in a while because I enjoy reading her mix of personal and academic writing, but it's not a priority for me because I'm usually just too busy. To be clear: the site is great, but it's not usually what I personally am looking for. What I would like to do with Violent History is something different. Rather than cite the various websites I would like to emulate or avoid, I think I have narrowed down three key goals that I have.
1. To learn from others.
2. To contribute to the learning of others.
3. To have fun.
These may seem like fairly straightforward objectives for a graduate student venturing into the online community, but to me they are an important realization. I'm sure that NKotH would agree with these goals, but I know that there is something different about the way these goals come together for me that will in turn make Violent History something different from her blog. For example, it should have been great fun to see that I had several dozen people coming in to read what I had to say each day, but by imposing upon myself the obligation to contribute I took the fun right out of the whole process. What I didn't want to do, however, was what many bloggers do, and that is to maintain the illusion of activity during quiet periods with some personal stories or silly chatter. That's just not my thing, at least not at this point in time. I want to provide a portrait of myself as a human being in this medium, but I want to do it subtly and incrementally. You've already learned from this post that I like flavored coffee, that I support fair trade, that I have a significant other named Hannah from Maine, and that I like Honey Nut Cheerios. There's a lot more to me, but that's enough for today. I prefer that you get to know me in bits and pieces as part of a longer and more meaningful process of interaction, rather than in otherwise purposeless entries meant to fill idle stretches with personal anecdotes.
What does this all mean? Well, it means that I want to write something that has a fairly high signal : noise ratio, and that I want the process of writing to contribute both to my own development and, at least eventually, to the development of others. I'm not pretentious enough to think that masses of people will care deeply about the things I have to say, but I also know that I wouldn't be putting my thoughts out in a public forum like this if I didn't hope others would read it. It also means that I'll be posting fairly slowly, because I'll usually need time to catch my breath between thoughts so that I can write things I'll be happy with. As much as I'll be disappointed to lose my few dozen daily visitors by only dropping weekly posts, other bloggers have gotten off to slower starts (often monthly at best for two years), and they did just fine.
So that concludes a very longwinded and multitiered introduction-- an introduction to the discussions on blogs and academia for friends and family, an introduction to who I am and what I'm doing here for those who don't know me, and an introduction for myself to the important questions that get at the root of what I want out of this experience. Like all things, I'm sure much of this will change. A big part of what I expect to enjoy about this project is its flexibility. I like knowing that I'll have a space where I can write and read about many different interests long after I'm busy working on a narrowly-defined dissertation topic. I look forward to learning, to sharing, and to having a good time. I'll close with a quote which I've recently become fond of, because it sets the standard that I like to think I might be working toward here, with varying degrees of success:
A bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios took the edge off my caffeine stress, and the daunting load of student emails helped rid me of the delusional obligation to my imagined fan club. But as I was replying to emails, I started to reflect on this feeling. I was frustrated with the fact that I had the good luck of this accidental audience and yet I was not posting frequently and well. In fact, with 560 pages of essays to grade last week, I posted neither frequently nor well. But who cares? Is the goal of this project really, as I seem to have constructed it in the back of my head, to post frequently and well? I wasn't even expecting to have a single reader outside my family and friends for months, and certainly not a few dozen total strangers per day in my first week.
By the time I was done with emails I had started to grapple with the important questions that I hadn't taken seriously before: "What is Violent History going to be?" "What won't it be?" Equally important in this particular up-to-the-second medium: "How often will it be?" And finally, the ultimate question: "Why?" Just as I was about to put all these thoughts to rest, adding them to the laundry list of Save as Draft notes to self of would-be posts, I got a phone call saying that the reserve readings for my grad seminar tomorrow got screwed up at the library and we had just one copy that would be left in the grad student lounge for people to wait in line for. With only a dim prospect of getting my hands on the reading until much later tonight, this seems as good a time as any to start dealing with these questions.
Let me start by saying that I don't feel it necessary to go into any detail about myself personally right now, or even into my particular interests as an historian. My academic pursuits will be a topic for another day, and my personal life is something that I suppose will unfold in layers over a long period of time, since it's not something I plan to put front and center here. What I want to talk about is how this project fits into the online community. While this is my first original content "blog" (a term I only grudgingly resign myself to use, because I have hated it and its spinoff puns and neologisms for years), I am fairly computer and web savvy. I've participated in a range a different online communities for over a decade, many of which fit to varying degrees within the alternative media genre that blogs supposedly now exemplify. I read an extensive amount of material from a wide range of sources in several languages online each day, and this includes a number of blogs. I even have a decent familiarity with the field of metablogging, the discussion of blogs by blogs. I think that this is a useful place to start, particularly for those few readers who are friends, family, and co-workers, most of whom don't know their blogosphere from their mesosphere.
While there have probably been the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of printed pages written on the topic of weblogs, very little has been written that I would ever recommend for anyone to read. Violent History exists at the intersection of the blogosphere (the world of weblogs) and academia, and fortunately this is a conjuncture that has produced some of the very best metablogging (discussion of weblogs, presumably by other bloggers, but I'm using the term loosely here). The best most recent discussion of blogging and the academy came in the latter half of 2005 in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In the July 8, 2005 article "Bloggers Need Not Apply", the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble fired the first shot of what would become a fierce debate over the job prospects of blogging grad students and untenured faculty. While he claims to recognize the potentially "legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum," Tribble focuses on his apparently horrifying experiences with "Professor Turbo Geek," "Professor Shrill," and "Professor Bagged Cat," all semifinalists in a faculty search at his college. His conclusions, though at times contradictory with respect to the importance of honesty and deceipt at various points in the application process, seem logical enough: don't exaggerate your qualifications, don't publicly disseminate rants about your colleagues and employers, etc. This would all be decent advice. As it turns out, however, it wasn't the bloggers but the googlers who were making inappropriate use of the internet. It appears that Professor Tribble & Co. only came to their damning conclusions about bloggers after putting in a substantial number of late nights scouring cached pages of material deleted by candidates (one would presume to protect their own privacy) and by stalking applicants across not only their own web pages but those of their friends. Mr. Tribble, it seems, is not the type of person who should be trusted with so much as an unsealed interoffice memo, and as such he doesn't belong in the position of courier, let alone search committee member at "Quaint Old College." A final testament to the unhelpful nature of Tribble's analysis is his paranoid dismissal of all weblogs, including the best and most professional among them, because "past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum."
This initial piece in the Chronicle sparked a firestorm of debate on the web, some of which made its way back into the publication's own pages. Most noteworthy of the blogged replies was that of Matthew Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English and Acting Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. His post, "Why I Blog Under My Own Name", is a very brief and very good reply to Tribble that places weblogs within the framework of the excellent (but massive) work of Philip Agre, "Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students". This is an important contribution not only to the blog debate but to Agre's volume on networking, which as of its 14 August 2005 formulation does not contain a single instance of the word "blog" or any of its variants. Kirshenbaum's blog was important enough to be referenced in a followup article by Tribble published in the Chronicle on September 2, 2005. That piece, "They Shoot Messengers, Don't They?", apparently scuttles the more ridiculous portions of Tribble's thesis by gleaning it down to the truism "be careful what you say" and wondering "why is it so controversial to add the word 'online'"? What remains is the same uninsightful, unhelpful original piece in its now unprovocative reformulation, that is noteworthy only because it is a necessary segue into the following excellent rebuttal.
"Do Not Fear the Blog" was written by Rebecca Goetz for the November 15, 2005 Chronicle. Before going any further, I want to congratulate Rebecca (whose (a)musings of a grad student is one of my favorite history websites), for winning a tenure track position! I should also point out that I refer to Rebecca by first name not because I know her (I don't) but because I detest referring to people by their last names-- a cold and impersonal practice of deference that was unfortunately abolished only incompletely by the American Revolution (yet another topic for a future post). In addition to Rebecca, the pseudonymous history blogger Another Damned Medievalist received similarly good news this weekend (and has since accepted the position). These brief asides actually underscore the legitimacy of Rebecca's rebuttal in the Chronicle. Though it deserves to be read in its entirety, some highlights are the emphasis on emerging communities of scholars in "carnivals" (the equivalent of online academic journals for bloggers) and the importance of blogging as both a resource and an outlet for those battling through the dissertation phase of their graduate work. "In short," she concludes, "I find that blogging makes my work better. What isn't to like about that?"
The experiences of Rebecca and ADM are certainly not universal. Last month saw the withdrawal of Indiana University Law School professor Jeff Cooper's weblog, Cooped Up. "The Amazing Disappearing Blog: Parts One, Two and Three" is a model for how to make a graceful exit, and it is as important as Rebecca's CHE article in considering whether or not to participate in this community.
By way of this very long introduction, I find myself back at the beginning. What is it that I intend to do here? To quote Ivan Tribble:
Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
Fair enough. There are websites I have come across that I do not personally find useful to me. Included in a longer list of posts on academia and weblogs that I didn't have space to discuss here was this one by New Kid on the Hallway, a tenure track medievalist at a small liberal arts college. I found this post very useful, and I check by her site once in a while because I enjoy reading her mix of personal and academic writing, but it's not a priority for me because I'm usually just too busy. To be clear: the site is great, but it's not usually what I personally am looking for. What I would like to do with Violent History is something different. Rather than cite the various websites I would like to emulate or avoid, I think I have narrowed down three key goals that I have.
1. To learn from others.
2. To contribute to the learning of others.
3. To have fun.
These may seem like fairly straightforward objectives for a graduate student venturing into the online community, but to me they are an important realization. I'm sure that NKotH would agree with these goals, but I know that there is something different about the way these goals come together for me that will in turn make Violent History something different from her blog. For example, it should have been great fun to see that I had several dozen people coming in to read what I had to say each day, but by imposing upon myself the obligation to contribute I took the fun right out of the whole process. What I didn't want to do, however, was what many bloggers do, and that is to maintain the illusion of activity during quiet periods with some personal stories or silly chatter. That's just not my thing, at least not at this point in time. I want to provide a portrait of myself as a human being in this medium, but I want to do it subtly and incrementally. You've already learned from this post that I like flavored coffee, that I support fair trade, that I have a significant other named Hannah from Maine, and that I like Honey Nut Cheerios. There's a lot more to me, but that's enough for today. I prefer that you get to know me in bits and pieces as part of a longer and more meaningful process of interaction, rather than in otherwise purposeless entries meant to fill idle stretches with personal anecdotes.
What does this all mean? Well, it means that I want to write something that has a fairly high signal : noise ratio, and that I want the process of writing to contribute both to my own development and, at least eventually, to the development of others. I'm not pretentious enough to think that masses of people will care deeply about the things I have to say, but I also know that I wouldn't be putting my thoughts out in a public forum like this if I didn't hope others would read it. It also means that I'll be posting fairly slowly, because I'll usually need time to catch my breath between thoughts so that I can write things I'll be happy with. As much as I'll be disappointed to lose my few dozen daily visitors by only dropping weekly posts, other bloggers have gotten off to slower starts (often monthly at best for two years), and they did just fine.
So that concludes a very longwinded and multitiered introduction-- an introduction to the discussions on blogs and academia for friends and family, an introduction to who I am and what I'm doing here for those who don't know me, and an introduction for myself to the important questions that get at the root of what I want out of this experience. Like all things, I'm sure much of this will change. A big part of what I expect to enjoy about this project is its flexibility. I like knowing that I'll have a space where I can write and read about many different interests long after I'm busy working on a narrowly-defined dissertation topic. I look forward to learning, to sharing, and to having a good time. I'll close with a quote which I've recently become fond of, because it sets the standard that I like to think I might be working toward here, with varying degrees of success:
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.
Pliny the Elder
posted by Isaac | 12:06 AM
4 Comments:
I've found that the best blogging is to be done when I have something to say but no legitimate academic avenue to present it in. As my areas of studies have shifted over the past year, so has what I've blogged (including an exhaustive stint commentating on the death of the previous Liberal government which was too long in coming...). I think Mark Grimsley said it best (I am paraphrasing and may be citing the wrong person): there shouldn't be a need to blog, and it shouldn't get in the way of doing real work but supplement it.
I look forward to reading what is to come,
Cheers.
A+ for effort, 2 bonus points for plugging Civ.
Pete: Thanks for the constructive thoughts. Just as a for-example related to the academic use of blogs, I spent much of the afternoon reading published primary sources on Utopian communities. Normally I like to work in two hour blocks, but I was able to plug away for four or five hours straight by alternating online reading (mostly of past history carnivals) with my academic work. I read carnivals as long as they held my interest, then got back to work until I felt my focus slipping, and so on. Some people might describe this as wasting time, but all of what I was reading was useful to me and it was an interesting balance that isn't really so different from reading the AHR during breaks. It made for a fun and productive afternoon (along with an exciting dinner and coffee with Marcel van der Linden, about which a post will be forthcoming after I see him again for brunch on Saturday).
Sir Brian: Not that I would have anything against plugging Civ (I'm going to be working up a review of it over break) but did I plug it? Maybe this post was just so long I forgot everything I covered...
Welcome (belatedly) to Blogtown (History District), and thanks for visiting Old is the New New! That's an excellent and sensitive manifesto / statement of purpose / throatclearing post.
Post a Comment
<< Home