Napoleon to heavy metal: academic blogs
By Editor on May 14, 2008 10:13 pm
SINCE THE INVENTION of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the internet has garnered significant academic attention from a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas of inquiry. In parallel, many academics started using the medium to complement their teaching and scholarship, to engage with a range of communities from the local to the global, and to present their ideas in a wider context. Academic blogging is rooted in these developments, even as it reflects the broader trend of blogging in all its complexity.
Here is a list of academic blogs — the first in a series of brief surveys aimed at providing readers with the contours of the blogging landscape.
Crooked Timber brings together an impressive list of contributors who blog on matters academic and non-academic. The blog’s home page today includes posts on American kleptocrats, philosopher Richard Rorty, the elections in America, and a blind reviewer vodoo doll.
The Social Science Research Council website includes a series of blogs edited by experts on the relevant topics. The list of blogs is modest as of now, but each blog appears to be the site of vibrant, engaged discussions as indicated in the often lengthy and detailed entries. The blogs cover questions of secularism, civic and public life, intellectual property and the knowledge economy, the violence in Darfur, and identity politics.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment presents the author’s views on Middle Eastern politics, history, and religion. Cole also runs the historical blog, Napoleon’s Egypt, which, as the title suggests, is about Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
Manan Ahmed’s Chapati Mystery with its whimiscal rotating images, comments on empire, colonialism, Islam, technology, and history. Ahmed also offers insightful critiques of the mainstream American media coverage of Islam. William Turkel’s Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive relentlessly examines innovative and creative ways to bring together the worlds of technology and history. Turkel has also compiled a valuable list of digital history blogs, which can be seen here.
Both Ahmed and Turkel also blog at Cliopatria, which is part of the History News Network. The winnners of the Cliopatria awards (from 2005 to 2007) for best history blogging defintely warrant a look.
Henry Jenkins runs the prolific Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which chronicles an extensive range of interests, including gaming, media convergence,the social impact of media, popular culture, and fan culture. Theory.org.uk is another media-related site that explores the intersection of popular culture and social theory. Run by David Gauntlett, the site addresses the emergence of ‘Media Studies 2.0,’ problematizes the media effects model, and offers viewers a resource archive. Eszter Hargittai blogs about communication, media, and technology at the eponymously named Eszter’s Blog.
What marks a blog as ‘academic’ is an interesting question: one that surely deserves a detailed examination in an article (or post!) of its own. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a detailed list of academic blogs, which detail a spectrum of academic concerns, interests, commitmments, and experiences in all their diversity that may shed some light on the matter.
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