Presentation on pragmatic aspects of blogging (German)

Since it’s a presentation that I put a lot of work into, I thought I might as well post it here. Below are the slides I used for my PhD defense on January 29th, 2009 (in German). The central theme is the distinction between writer-centric and reader-centric blogging that I have also explored both in my thesis and in a recent article.

On a side note, I have decided to post preprints of several papers that I currently have in the works here shortly, mostly because the publication process is taking forever and I am getting impatient (two papers are set to appear in paper monographs, which is a ridiculously slow means of publishing that is still highly popular in the Humanities). As someone who is very much involved in investigating scholarly publishing and its future, I am becoming more and more convinced that paper-based publishing (1), closed-access distribution (2) and *our current form of peer review (3) are all aspects of scholarly communication that are in dire need of reform and improvement. The Internet won’t magically do away with all our problems, but conducting discussions of blogging practices in paper volumes is simply more idiosyncrasy than I can stomach.

* = Note that I am not questioning the essentiality of peer review, but the way we are currently conducting it.