Thoughts and research on academic blogging

A friend just pointed me to this piece on academic blogging published in Times Higher Education. It’s an interesting read, though many of the names and examples used in the article were already familiar to me.

I’ve been studying blogging for quite a while now, and specifically the use of blogs in academia and research is something I want to investigate in more detail in the near future. Science blogging will be a central topic in the session I’ll moderate at the Berlin 6 Conference in two weeks and I’ve recently written a grant proposal for a project that would focus specifically on blogging in the humanities and social sciences.

Among other things, I would like to investigate

• hard factors (based on natural data, i.e. the blogs themselves) such as
  • who blogs and who doesn’t (age, disciplinary background etc),
  • what, when and how academics blog (formal properties such as post length, type of content words used, tags, stylistic features, use of links and quotes, visual presentation, frequency of posts etc)
• soft factors (based on interviews with practitioners and meta-discussions on blogging) such as
  • how academics characterize their activity relative to ‘general-purpose’ bloggers (using similar questions, this could be compared to the results of the Pew and Technorati studies)
  • how blogs are conceptualized by their users (as scientific publications, scribbled public notes, discussions with peers, personal musings, a mixture of all these things)
  • what the perceived advantages and disadvantages of blogs are (risk of being snubbed, losing credibility etc)

I’ve used a similar bivariate approach in my PhD thesis to look at hard and soft factors of how corporate blogs are written. Language data found on the Internet is difficult to evaluate without contextual information and my impression is that the ethnographic approach (interviewing practitioners, meta-discussion) often holds the key for truly understanding what is going on. Both talking to bloggers and applying standard language analysis techniques to the data they produce is likely to yield the most comprehensive picture of academic blogging and where it is headed in the future.

Blogs are used for many different reasons by many different people and therefore a lot of misunderstandings arise about their usage. A senior scholar may think that since adolescents use blogs to document their lives and to foster social relationships, blogs are inappropriate for academic purposes – such personal concerns have nothing to do with serious scholarship after all (right?).

The artificiality with which researchers (and ‘professionals’ in other contexts) separate their personal and professional lives is an interesting discussion point in itself, but even assuming that the two remain detached from one another, a blog entry can be as ’serious’ as any journal article.

At the core, a blog is merely a personal publishing platform for distributing content in a sequential mode. The latter – sequentiality – is what truly distinguishes the blog from other publishing technologies (wikis, which connect information syntagmatically via hyperlinks; general websites, which often have a hierarchical content structure). Blogs, along with wikis and other hypertext publishing platforms, have the potential to become extremely powerful tools for research because they are so versatile and simple to use. Simplicity and ease of use are often-underestimated but crucial factors when it comes to the apoption of new technologies.