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New Issue of Lore, with Section on Academic Blogging

Submitted by Clancy on 4 January 2005 - 8:09pm

I'm pleased to see that the new issue of Lore is out, which features the Digressions section on academic blogging. I've got a brief essay in there, and if you'd like to respond to it, please feel free to do so here. I'll probably be posting responses to some of the other essays here too; I don't have time right now to read them, but several of them sound intriguing. I'll probably start with Dennis's piece.

UPDATE: Responses from Torill and Kristine.

The Link Portal on Gender in the Blogosphere

Submitted by Clancy on 21 December 2004 - 5:52pm

As I'm in the midst of writing a dissertation which is a feminist rhetorical analysis of gender and blogging practices, I've been assembling all the links I can find on the debates about gender in the blogosphere. Given the recent discussion at Crooked Timber and Laura's request for a list of posts, I thought I'd share these links. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I'll continue to add to it. You're welcome to do so too.

August 2002

Doc Searls (22 August)
Shelley Powers (22 August)
Dorothea Salo (#1) (25 August)
Doc Searls (27 August)
Jonathon Delacour (27 August)
Doc Searls (28 August)
Jonathon Delacour (28 August)
Mike Golby (28 August)
Dorothea Salo (#2) (28 August)
Dorothea Salo (#3) (28 August)
Shelley Powers (#2) (30 August)

September 2002

Up Yours (7 September)
Megan McArdle (8 September)
N.Z. Bear (8 September)
Natalie Solent (8 September)
Balloon Juice (9 September)
cut on the bias (9 September)
Jim Miller (9 September)
Just One Minute (9 September)
Alas, a Blog (9 September)
Gene Expression (9 September)
Letter from Gotham (#1) (9 September)
Improved Clinch (9 September)
Letter from Gotham (#2) (9 September)
No Watermelons Allowed (#1) (9 September)
No Watermelons Allowed (#2) (9 September)
Homeobox (9 September)
Meryl Yourish (9 September, #1)
Meryl Yourish (9 September, #2)
Meryl Yourish (9 September, #3)
Poet and Peasant (10 September)
Up Yours (18 September)
InstaPundit (18 September)

November 2002

Liz Lawley (27 November)
Mike Golby (29 November)

September 2003

Liz Lawley (21 September)

October 2003

Halley Suitt (24 October)
Liz at Misbehaving (24 October)

November 2003

danah at Misbehaving (11 November)
Shelley Powers (18 November)
Jill at Misbehaving (21 November)

December 2003

Shelley Powers (2 December)

January 2004

danah boyd (5 January)
danah at Misbehaving (5 January)
danah at Misbehaving (7 January)
Liz at Misbehaving (18 January)

March 2004

Pandagon (8 March)
CJR Daily (8 March)
Pandagon (9 March)
Daily KOS (9 March)
Suburban Guerrilla (9 March)
Respectful of Otters (9 March)
Daniel Drezner (11 March)
Amanda Butler (11 March)
Megan McArdle (11 March)
Apt. 11D (12 March)
Radio Free Blogistan (14 March)
Trish Wilson (19 March)
David Fono (31 March)

April 2004

Shelley Powers (2 April)
Liz at Misbehaving (5 April)
A Small Victory (12 April)
Right Wing News (12 April)
Ilyka Damen (18 April)
Right Wing News (22 April)
Right Wing News (29 April)

May 2004

Matthew Yglesias (27 May)
Daniel Drezner (May 31)

June 2004

Trish Wilson (at Feministe) (1 June)
Trish Wilson (1 June)
Matthew Yglesias (1 June)
Daniel Drezner (2 June)
Feministe (2 June)
Shelley Powers (2 June)
Rox Populi (2 June)
Kevin Drum (2 June)
Dave Weinberger (3 June)
Pinko Feminist Hellcat (3 June)
Feministe (4 June)
Pete at The Power of Many (4 June)
danah at Misbehaving (8 June)
Shelley Powers (21 June)

August 2004

Shelley Powers (16 August)
Matt Stoller (27 August)
Amanda at Mouse Words (30 August)
Wicked Muse (30 August)
Utopian Hell (30 August)
Feministe (30 August)
Trish Wilson (31 August)
XX (31 August)
Pinko Feminist Hellcat (31 August)
Shelley Powers (31 August)

September 2004

Rad Geek (1 September)
Shelley Powers (21 September)

October 2004

Shelley Powers (11 October)
Fiona at Misbehaving (14 October)
Gina at Misbehaving (20 October)

November 2004

Andrea Buchanan, guest blogging at Buzz, Balls & Hype (21 November)
Half Changed World (26 November)

December 2004

Kieran Healy (17 December)
David Adesnik (17 December)
Tongue But No Door (18 December)
Joe Gandelman (18 December)
The Little Professor (18 December)
Geeky Mom (18 December)
Thanks for Not Being a Zombie (19 December)
Bitch. Ph.D. (19 December, #1)
Bitch. Ph.D. (19 December, #2)
Loaded Mouth (19 December)
Professional Lurker (22 December)
Utopian Hell (24 December)

January 2005

Flea (9 January)

February 2005

Trish Wilson (18 February)
Pinko Feminist Hellcat (18 February)
Kevin Drum (20 February)
The Sideshow (20 February)
Rox Populi at The American Street (20 February)
Ayn Clouter at The American Street (20 February)
James Joyner at Outside the Beltway (20 February)
La Shawn Barber (20 February)
Meryl Yourish (21 February)
Feministe (21 February)
Trish Wilson (21 February)
Sisu (21 February)
Polipundit (21 February)
Kesher Talk (21 February)
Conglomerate (21 February)
Ann Althouse (21 February)
Long Story, Short Pier (21 February)
Brutal Women (21 February)
Random Thoughts (21 February)
What She Said! (21 February)
Dummocrats (21 February)
Elayne Riggs (21 February)
Echidne of the Snakes (21 February)
Meryl Yourish (22 February)
Kevin Drum (22 February)
WILLisms (22 February)
Feministe 22 February)
Loaded Mouth (22 February)
Bitch. Ph.D. (22 February)
Ilyka Damen (22 February)
Julie Saltman (22 February)
Feministing (22 February)
Unfogged (22 February, #1)
Unfogged (22 February, #2)
Majikthise (22 February)
Right Wing News (22 February)
Least-Loved Bedtime Stories (22 February)
Meryl Yourish (23 February)
Citizen's Rent (23 February)
Ann Althouse (23 February)
Plum Crazy (23 February)
Fiat Lux (23 February)
Media Girl (23 February)
PZ Myers (23 February)
Ann Althouse (24 February)

March 2005

Cake Eater Chronicles (3 March)
Shelley Powers (7 March)
Michelle Malkin (14 March)

I know there are many, MANY more links I'm missing right now (including anything that might have been said during calendar year 2003), and this is just a start. Comment away!

38 comments

Historicity and Internet Research

Submitted by Clancy on 21 December 2004 - 11:52am

At AoIR 2003, in a roundtable on qualitative internet research, Annette Markham said (my paraphrase):

We need to place our research in history; ahistoricity is a problem. Go to other researchers' work even if you're working with a new technology--other researchers have already thought through epistemological and theoretical problems.

A sensible statement, one to which I don't think many people would object, but still, I came across a nice illustration of this claim and would like to share it. Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace, an article about MOOs, was written by James P. Zappen, Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina, published in 1997, but based on research they did in Fall 1994 during a ten-week colloquium in the Diversity University MOO. It struck me that one could pretty easily substitute the word "weblog" for "MOO" in this passage, that the issues and questions raised continue to be quite relevant (last paragraph of the article):

Traditional rhetoric focuses its attention upon a single rhetor (or perhaps single rhetors each in turn) seeking purposefully and intentionally to persuade an audience within a single community upon the basis of shared beliefs and values. We found in our colloquium in the MOO a kind of rhetoric and a kind of community that seem to us to be quite unlike anything that we see in the mainstream of the tradition--a rhetoric and a community characterized by a multiplicity of languages and perspectives and a consequent challenge to the rhetor to find the opportune moment to enter into and influence the course of a discussion. Though we recognize the current limits to the access and use of this technology, we nonetheless believe that the MOO has potential to become a contemporary rhetorical community--a public space or forum--within which local communities and individuals can express themselves and develop mutual respect and understanding via dialogue and discussion, and we believe that the graduate students who participated with us in our colloquium demonstrated this possibility through their own positive action in making this space their own. Given the potentially global reach of the MOO, we also believe that it has potential not only to transmit information across time, space, and cultural differences but more especially to provide a forum for dialogue and discussion among people of vastly different cultural backgrounds and beliefs, to become, if we choose to make it such, a contemporary rhetorical community in cyberspace.

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Amazon and Blogs

Submitted by Clancy on 20 December 2004 - 11:45am

Blogging

Chuck has alerted me to the fact that my blog is listed on Amazon. I wonder if anyone has written reviews of the blogs, and I'm also curious to see if blogs will be added to the dropdown menu for Amazon's search function and integrated with books, CDs, DVDs, etc. in Amazon's recommendation system. It could, perhaps, be a good thing for those of us seeking some kind of recognition in academia for blogging.

Linkage

Submitted by Clancy on 17 December 2004 - 8:27am

Austin Lingerfelt has just posted a fine essay on using weblogs in the classroom (Via Chuck).

Visual Rhetoric Bibliography (Via Delicious Jill.)

A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books): This story examines the tactics of savvy authors who are trying to get a publishing contract; some have been successful at using their weblogs to demonstrate that there's an audience for whatever they're working on, and then there are the Julie/Julia and Salam Pax precedents -- I think Ginmar also has a book deal -- as proof that it's possible to get a book out of a blog. It's great, but I worry about how this will go over in academia. I would like to, if not see everything go online, at least to remove the electronic scholarly publishing stigma once and for all, and I'll be dismayed if weblogs are used as a means to a (proprietary) print end. I don't mean to come across as this paranoid about it, but the thought has crossed my mind.

Oh, and I'm about to go home for three lovely weeks, so I might not be blogging all that much.

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A Drupal Shortcoming

Submitted by Clancy on 17 December 2004 - 12:36am

I don't dislike many things about Drupal, but one of them is the fact that, when I create a collaborative book, I can't put it in categories in the taxonomy. Here's a redundant link to my series of blogging handouts for my Fall 2004 section of Rhetoric 1101 so that someone who clicks on my "Teaching" or my "Blogging" categories can find it.

Blogging: The Semester in Review

Submitted by Clancy on 17 December 2004 - 12:13am

I've been wanting to share all my weblog-related handouts from my Rhetoric 1101 course this semester in case anyone wants a concrete sense of exactly how we used the weblog and in case anyone might find the materials useful. Overall, I feel that the course blogging went very well, given what my goals for the weblog were. My goal was not so much to have a weblog that was painfully obviously just for a grade (i.e. forced blogging); instead, I hoped for something that read like a community weblog of twenty-two first-year college students writing about what was on their minds, loosely guided by the principle that the content ought to be tied in some tacit way to rhetoric. In other words, I wanted the weblog to serve one of my central pedagogical objectives, namely to facilitate a close community ethos in the classroom, and I wanted the weblog to be a place to apply and synthesize the rhetorical principles we were discussing in class (ethos, pathos, logos, informal fallacies, etc.). I offered weekly topics (evaluation forms I'd passed out in a previous class suggested that such topics would benefit students who were having trouble thinking of something to write about), but I encouraged the students to blog about other topics if they liked, which they often did. I drew from the web and from what other bloggers were writing about and tried to offer a broad range of topics and a number of selections each week, and sometimes I riffed off what the students brought to the blog and made topics based on their thoughts and questions.

Reflecting on the experience, I am even more convinced that it's best to, if at all possible, have one weblog for the whole class rather than individual weblogs. All the posts are in one place, which makes it easier for the instructor as well as more interesting for the students, who see new posts and comments every time they hit the site. I believe the novelty piqued their curiosity and caused them to visit the site more often, which is what we all do, right? I know I'm more likely to go to a site that is updated frequently. Also, and I know many won't like this, but I would argue that if the central objective of the weblog is to build a learning community, it works well to grade based on level of participation only and throw out the rubrics. I didn't have any requirements for the posts in terms of word count, linking, or appropriate language; I wanted to try an almost-unregulated space that would allow for a great degree of freedom for different tones of voice and some experimentation. Below is the first handout I gave them. Of course a good bit of discussion and background information accompanied it, but these handouts are what they saw.

What About Blogs? A Literature Review Introducing Nascent Pedo-Blogs to the Blogging World

Submitted by Clancy on 5 December 2004 - 4:23pm

Check out this piece by Nicole Converse Livengood of Purdue University, written for Linda Bergmann's Writing Across the Curriculum seminar. It's a good prolegomenon-style essay, especially for people who don't know a lot about weblogs and would like to explore their potential uses in writing classes.

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