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:
Blogging by itself is probably not small-s scholarship.
There are many reasons why people might list their blogs on their CVs,
much in the same way that most academics who maintain static web
sites list those URLs on their CVs. In my own case, I see Steven
D. Krause's Official Blog as a part of my academic identity
and my intellectual life. My blog does have an audience (albeit
a small one), which means that there are people within my field
and in academia in general who know something about me by virtue
of my blog. So, in that sense, it seems perfectly reasonable for
me to note my blog on a CV and even to potentially discuss it
in a case for tenure or promotion.
However, that does not mean that blogging itself constitutes scholarship
in the sense of something that ought to count towards tenure. Much
like participation in electronic mailing list discussions, blogging
does not seem to me to have the same materiality, focus, or value of
the self-published web sites I discussed in version 1.0 or some
of the new examples I discuss in this revision.
Of course, as I discussed in version 1.0 of this article, decisions
about what does and does not count as scholarship are always local,
and the role of blogs as a scholarly practice at most schools is probably
quite similar to that of other self-published web sites. In my own
case for tenure (and in the cases of Lee Honeycutt and Daniel Anderson,
as I discuss in the section "Making
it Count: Four Examples, Five Years Later"), I had enough
traditional scholarship in the form of articles, book chapters, and
presentations, meaning the committee never had to seriously consider
my self-published web work.
In this sense, I think blogging occupies space similar to more
static self-published web sites: as something in addition to
more conventional types of scholarship, academic blogs can probably
be counted. However, I suspect that the academic blogger who pointed
exclusively at his or her blog in order to make a case for
tenure or promotion would likely face denial.
Blogging is an important act of capital-S Scholarship. That
is, it is one way to particpate in the larger discussion of an academic
field and to advance knowledge and discussion is to blog. This is one
of the reasons why I think that academic blogging is as popular as
it is, even if it has somewhat dubious applicability as scholarship
that can be counted on a CV. And as I think is clear with the situations
reported by myself, Honeycutt, and Anderson (along with Marshall
Poe), sometimes Scholarship ultimately brings more
reward than mere scholarship.
Clearly, this is the main appeal for most academics who blog-- and
there are a lot of academics who keep blogs, as Henry
Farrell's fine wiki, "The Academic Blog Portal," demonstrates.
I think that most academics who blog appreciate the flexibility,
immediacy, and freedom to participate in a Scholarly act that furthers
knowledge, opinion, and discussion in a host of different fields,
and that creates what J.
Bradford DeLong called "The Invisible College" (2006).
Indeed, if we think about blogging in these idealic terms, perhaps
it's best that it not be corrupted by the less than noble goals of "making
it count" scholarship.
Blog capital-S Scholarship has the potential to lead to small-s
scholarship.
That is, while blogging in and of itself probably doesn't rise to
the level of something that most institutions would count as scholarship
for the purposes of review, tenure, and promotion, it can lead to
scholarship indirectly. I mean this in at least two senses. First,
many academic bloggers have commented on the role of their blog as
a sounding board/drafting space/feedback loop on their other scholarly
projects. Collin
Brooke's Rhetworks and
Johndan Johnson-Eilola's former blog datacloud
and current blog work/space
are (and were) specifically devoted to conventional print projects.
But besides these explicit blog projects, I think it's fair to say
that many (most?) academic bloggers use their blog writing much in
the same way as a journal: as an invention and reflection heuristic,
but one that they are sharing with colleagues in the field.
And of course, there are some of us who in the course of our blogging
engage in S/scholarship about blogging itself. This analogy may be
a bit of a stretch, but blogging about blogging may be seen as similar
to the role of video game playing in the role of some recent scholars'
work in the relationship between video games and literacy: while scholars
exploring the connections between video games and literacy (and here
I am thinking of the writers and scholars contributing to blogs like Joystick101)
certainly must play video games, they probably don't count their actual
video game play as scholarship. Rather, video game play is the Scholarship
that potentially leads to the articles, chapters, web sites, books,
etc. that can count as scholarship.