And What About Blogs, Anyway?

In my own S/scholarship, the most significant development in self-publishing on the web has been blogging. In fact, as an outgrowth of version 1.0 of this article and in preparation for a presentation at the 2003 CCCC, I began keeping a blog-like site, krause.emich.edu/blog (available here via the Internet Archive). Of course, I mean blog-like in the same sense that two cans connected by a string are phone-like: this 2003 site masquerading as a blog is pitifully crude and simplistic by contemporary blogging standards.

In any event, in my last entry on this blog-like site, dated March 15, 2003, I reflected on how I felt that blogs did not automatically count as scholarship, writing:

I don't think a blog in and of itself can rise to the level of scholarship, much in the same way that self-published academic web sites can't inherently be called scholarship. As I tried to suggest in my CCC-Online essay, what counts as "scholarship" is ultimately based more on institutional politics. And until there is some sort of vetting process offered by NCTE or other publication that provides peer review to self-published web sites, it seems to me that individuals who want their blog spaces to count as scholarship are going to have to make the same sort of arguments as those who want to make their other self-published web work count as scholarship.

I think this is still the case, though with some important caveats: