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A blog about using blogs. Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker wrote: "Blogging Thoughts, personal publication as an online research tool". Next project is: "Intimate Confessions and Public Display". This blog works as space in which to collect ideas and tangents to this research.
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28.2.02
An article about how google loves weblogs, including an example where someone got readers to link to "Critical IP sucks" which quickly made his weblog a higher hit on google than the actual ISP, Critical IP.
posted by Jill at 10:45
Annalee Newitz expresses her journalistic annoyance with bloggers:
I fear the blog. Partly this is just jealousy, because as a writer I'm trying to put my stamp on the news as quickly as possible, and bloggers inevitably get there before me with their endless updates and capacious discussion threads and daunting lists of hotlinks. Then there are the enviable ways in which blogs deliver their news guerrilla-style ? no matter how weird your information source might be, it counts. A blogger can announce some new development in DNS security by quoting the free-software developer he fucked the night before. He can quote some woman who works on a movie set to appease Lord of the Rings fans, or get inside information about Big Bill's Agenda from a blog freak who works at Microsoft and e-mails her favorite bloggers about it. The point is, all forms of communication count.
What the blog threatens to do is dislodge the traditional news media's corner on the "scoop" market. With their unorthodox reporting strategies and lightning-fast publishing schedules, blogs are making it clear that you don't need to have some big, fancy newspaper job to break stories. In fact, you don't even need to write stories; you can just throw a couple of sentences up on your site with some telling links. And you can quote that naked boy in your bed who knows how to hack protocols. Whatever.
posted by Jill at 10:40
By way of Lisbeth and Elin, Henry Jenkins explains his position.
Not really surprising, he explained his position pretty well in the article, the most interesting thing here is that he has to use the blog of a student to reach "the blogging community". Or rather, this is interesting on several levels
1) that he feels the need to explain himself.
2) that he does so by way of his students - that is, by way of a group of people already firmly positioned within the frames of academic authorithy.
3) that he feels the need to explain himself to a group which he thinks of as different from the people who read magazines - the bloggers.
4) that he feels a need to point out that he can be reached by email, and that he replies to them, as if email and blogs are comparable media.
I respect Henry Jenkins, I like Textual Poachers and I don't agree with Tinka on that, but here it looks like he is overreaching, trying to talk through too many secondary channels.
posted by Torill at 05:18
Henry Jenkin's has written a fairly long response which is posted at Elin's blog.
posted by Jill at 00:55
25.2.02
vog blog::vlog
Here's one of the things which annoys me a little as the reader of Ceres/Tinderbox-produced blogs. As a faithful reader of Adrian's site, I get overwhelmed when he doesn't post for three weeks, and then suddenly pours three weeks of writing into his weblog. I have noticed the same to a lesser extent with Jill and Mark. To me, reading blogs is about the little drips of thoughts - about surfing for a few minutes and finding something new and different, occasionally delightful and thought-provoking in already familiar places. Three weeks of writing, that's like going for a cup of coffe, and having to sit through a 30-minute speach before you can escape with your (by now cold) stimulant.
I think that with Tinderbox, blogs move closer to the traditional homepages, as Elin points out in her post On being a coachroach, because the posting, particularly when compared to Dreamweaver, is more similar to the production of home-pages: you work on it offline, preferably in a program on your own computer, and then you ftp it to the site in question. Blogger invites a different way of posting - more regular, less edited, more immediate.
This isn't good or bad, just serves different purposes. But if I am to read large amounts of text it needs to be presented more coherently than if I am to read a few paragraphs, so the different technologies support different styles of writing. I happen to like the short posts (which this is not, thus proving it's possible to be wordy in blogger as well.)
posted by Torill at 01:54
23.2.02
Dennis Mahoney has an article at A List Apart: How to Write a Better Weblog. He reckons the writing has to improve, and become more "professional" - more precise, better spelling and grammar etc. Dave Winer (who really does have fast and clear commentary on virtually anything that moves near a blog) reckons this is "mostly OK" but points out that amateur doesn't mean bad, it just means you're not paid. Mark Bernstein points out that sometimes, amateur writing is just what you want. (This post is purely descriptive, no pithy declarations, sorry) [update, Monday: A longish, considered, angered response to that A List Apart thing about How to Write A Better Weblog from whereeveryouare. "t's a long time since I heard such unmitigated snobbery. (..) Is Dennis Mahoney therefore suggesting that all of us should have gone to writing classes, or spent long evenings indoors practicing our writing skills, before we dared to place our thoughts online?" And there's Jenny's sourly to the point in her response too: '"Links and word of mouth can go a long way, but don’t expect a big following right off the bat." is a TERRIBLE mixed metaphor. (..) if you want what he's offering: basic, sound advice on what not to do and how to keep it short, go to your local hard-copy bookstore, and ask for a thing called Strunk and White. it's all you need."]
posted by Jill at 09:38
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TORILL!
posted by Jill at 07:12
22.2.02
Comments to Tinka. And Lisbeth, only I posted them in Tinka's blog cos she has comments. Interesting thoughts, Tinka. I'm curious: How did the CBCBC cluster form? Clearly not only because of geographic proximity - there are other bloggers in Copenhagen, such as Lisbeth, for instance, and no doubt many others. So did you know each other before you started blogging? Did you meet because of the blogs? Because you used the same blogging tool? Same themes?
Clusters are a bit unnerving in some ways. If you look at some of Cameron Marlow's work (he's the guy doing his phd on Blogdex and social networks among bloggers), for instance at his blog overstated, you'll see that a few people have a LOT more influence on the democratic blogging community than others. Who you link to directly affects the site you've linked to's ratings on google and Blogdex. So if a lot of people link to one site that site gets more readers and more people link to it etc...
I find that faintly disturbing. It worries me.
Blogs aren't a democratic form. They're a meritocracy. And that merit, once arbitrarily determined, inflates endlessly, shutting all but a select few out.
What a dour view. Maybe I'm letting the rain get to me too much.
posted by Jill at 08:19
Found this article on Knowledge Management through blogs while searching for something else.
posted by Torill at 07:04
Universitetsforlaget : Om Universitetsforlaget
Jill: se nøye på dette.
posted by Torill at 03:36
dust.from.a.distant.sun.
Tinka is "blogsitting", and she, quite justified, I think, wonders what a blog-sitter does. According to Dennis, the owner of the blog, the job-description is: "Oh, just post some semi-interesting stuff you would not post on your own site. I'm not fussed".
This indicates that the news-aspect of the blog is more important than the subjective/personal aspect. It's more important that it is seen to be active than who keeps it alive. Why is that? Is there a fear of losing readers? That they will surf elsewhere, their loyalty to the blog in question lost?
posted by Torill at 01:03
21.2.02
eNarrative.org: Hypertext, Narrative, Flash, Time
looking around with google for links to this blog, I found this program.
If they plan to read our blogs to prepare, I bet they will be talking about very interesting topics!
posted by Torill at 05:32
Just slipping this link in here, so we'll find what I wrote about the deleted cockroaches.
The recent whining about the quality of blogging, combined with the peer review project is interesting. It makes me wonder: are there really that many bad blogs out there? That should be checked somehow. We should find a way to look at random blogs, have some criteria for "good" and then see if we manage to rate them. Rating blogs would be close to impossible though, because they are so very subjective, and so would our rating be. Still worth thinking of, to see if it would be doable.
posted by Torill at 04:25
20.2.02
I've gotten all confused about where I'm posting stuff. Now the article's finished (though I think we should add a paragraph about the latest developments in the Jenkins affair (He deleted "cockroaches", as Torill commented, and earlier I wrote about the power balance between writer and people being written about) - uh, now the article's finished I'm posting more at jill/txt and then I think it should be here and then I think, no, there, no, here, oh well, whereever I guess.
Also this bit taken from a long post at onepotmeal (it's part of a blogyarn) relates to the authorial control and communication between the traditionally separate spheres of academia and people on the web.
Yes, content is about trust: trusting that as reveal ourselves, albeit in a controlled fashion but no more controlled than when we meet new friends in the 'real' world, that content will be taken seriously by its receivers. That, in effect, as we perform our hypertext ballets the audience may not clap very loudly, and it may boo occasionally, but it won't throw rotten vegetables unless we absolutely deserve it. And, ideally, the audience will tell what we are doing wrong and step in to help us—which is something authors never had before. Which explains why John Dvorak's article got such a wide response lately: we, as the members of this evolving community with its evolving standards and practices, read and evaluated his article as we would read another blog, looking for a level of trust and fellowship with his readers which Dvorak simply didn't offer. It doesn't' make him a bad guy, it just makes him a journalist rather than a blogger.
posted by Jill at 14:27
Dave Winer to Wired:
Winer added that the technology behind weblogging still needs to get significantly easier for the real talent to come online. "What I'm interested in is the doctors and professors and engineers and people who have a good education and a social area of expertise. We need to really reach those people, we have to go a couple of levels in terms of ease-of-use."
Sad, really, isn't it. Us helpless academics.
posted by Jill at 14:20
ramble, rant, rave: Eating lemons and liking it.
Sophisticated linkslutting.... she has a function that displays recent links to booboolina. And so, I can link to her an others will follow this link here and be trapped in this fascinating academic environment.
And I found it by way of Hilde, who's already on the list.
posted by Torill at 06:15
17.2.02
Cameron Marlow, whose PhD project at the MIT Media Lab is Blogdex, has a personal blog, overstated, which has lots of good info about the way he thinks about the social network explorer, blogdex, etc etc etc. Among other things, he's using the data from Blogdex to work out where memes originate, who starts using them, and he relates this to their place in the social network of blogs as determined by who links to who. For instance, the more central an individual is to the entire network, the more probable it is that they are also a meme-originator. This points to either a) good links attracts an audience, or b) popularity makes memes spread. My instinct tells me that the answer lies somewhere in between. Dave Winer's leader of meme-production; Jason Kottke's the most popular blogger; and Cameron is working out how this stuff fits together. This is fascinating stuff; mixing the very technical details of Blogdex's working with this kind of real-world analysis. It's not the who is most popular contest that's interesting in itself; but the tracking of what this structure does to the way ideas travel.
posted by Jill at 02:06
Here's what we've written for the essay about Henry Jenkins' weblog article. Oh, and the article will be published online simultaneously with its print publication; all by the University of Oslo. I'm glad it'll be online. It's important that this kind of academic paper is easily available.
As we were finishing this paper, a brief article on weblogs ‘Blog This’, was published by Henry Jenkins, noted media scholar at MIT. This is the first article published on weblogs by an academic, as far as we have been able to ascertain. The thesis of Jenkins’ article is that weblogs are powerful and may become even more influential by filling the current lull in commercialisation of the Internet. However, the words that he uses clearly show that he thinks of bloggers as a very different species to himself, and presumably, to the other academics he is primarily writing for:
Like cockroaches after nuclear war, online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot coms. (..) Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.
In the days after the article was published, bloggers have indeed ‘blogged this’, as Jenkins invited them to, bringing Jenkins’ article to second place in the ‘most linked to’ URLs at Blogdex on 16 February 2002. Dave Winer has written the most extensive commentary on the article to date, and is clearly offended at being called a cockroach, and at Jenkins’ obvious amazement at the power of bloggers. Winer defends himself and us other bloggers by angrily pointing out that in the late 70s, IBM didn’t think the personal computing community was a threat either, and see where that led ! Jenkins would probably agree with Winer, but his style alienates the bloggers he praises. In his use of language, Jenkins treats bloggers as objects of research; and to some extent, as objects of wonder to be exhibited as extreme and freakish (‘cockroaches’, ‘extreme sports’). This objectification and alienation is in stark contrast to bloggers’ own perception of their community as made up of writing, verbal, influential subjects. The distancing techniques Jenkins uses, and his unfortunate choice of imagery, are typical for academics, who are so used to studying new technologies as exotic objects that they fail to see that they could be useful within academia itself. It is interesting that the pivotal event which made Jenkins write of weblogs, took place at a conference where weblogs were an important part of the conference publications .
A few months ago, I was at the Camden Pop!Tech conference, and the guy sitting next to me was typing incessantly into his wireless laptop, making notes on the speakers, finding relevant links and then hitting the send key—instantly updating his Web site. No sooner did he do so than he would get responses back from readers around the country. He was a blogger .
The speed with which the comments on keynotes and speeches were published, defies the control of peer reviewed publications and other authorative academic voices. Perhaps Henry Jenkins is worried that he might lose control. That would be a feasible fear for a senior and well respected scholar faced with the rapid changes of online discourse. In his article he even tries to take control of the responses of the people blogging his article, through the last couple of paragraphs where he first tells us all what different reactions we will respond with, and second asks if we will please blog him.
posted by Jill at 01:53
16.2.02
While this isn't a very academic look at blogs (I had to make the link go from that. I'm sorry, I'm being naughty, but I really want that on the front page of Blogdex as one of the phrases linking to the article... asking for trouble really, aren't I), it is written by a prominent academic: Henry Jenkins. Dave Winer's not impressed, and takes offense at being called a cockroach. Jenkins isn't very generous, I suppose, in his characterisation of bloggers: "Like cockroaches after nuclear war, online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot coms." Jenkins argues that us blogging cockroaches may have a good deal of influence on the Internet, coming as we do in this lull of commercialisation. Winer reckons Jenkins doesn't go far enough. I think he's really quite angry, you know: "Call us cockroaches if you want, I'm sure IBM thought Apple, Microsoft and Intel were cute and dirty too, but distributed and decentralized news is rapidly becoming an accomplished fact, as fractional horsepower computers overtook centralized and controlled computers in the 80s." (Scripting Log, 15 Feb 2002, bottom of the day's entries) Of course, Jenkins does also call us "snowboarders" in a very us vs. them piece describing himself and his readers as surfers. I'm not sure whether snowboarders are cooller than surfers. Are they? Colder, definitely. Blogging as an extreme sport? Is this jealousy or distrust of blogging? "Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution." Cockroaches. Snowboarding. Extreme sport. Them. The rest of us. Hm.
Jenkins does seem to be positive and open but in a rather distanced disapproving scared sort of a way that he may not even be conscious of being present in his writing. It's clear that bloggers are extreme to him.
posted by Jill at 10:45
Rebecca Blood, who wrote that excellent article on the history of blogging, has a book out on blogs; or rather, she will have in June 2002. It's already listed with amazon: Rebecca Blood: We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture. At the same time, The Weblog Handbook: A Practical Guide to Creating and Maintaining Your Own Blog will be published - in paperback. Hm. Soon there'll be a dummies guide to keeping a weblog full of silly advice. Honestly. This is "Finally a book for anyone who has ever thought about starting a Weblog but wasn't sure what to post, how to post, or even where to go to register." Maybe I'm being unecessarily impatient but how silly is a person who's heard of a weblog but hasn't figured out where to go to find out how to start his or her own? Hm. Oh well, if there's a market for it, go for it, I guess.
posted by Jill at 10:32
15.2.02
We are beyond 10 000 words now. The upper limit we worried that we ought to almost make ( aiming for 8500-9500 words) is way back there. We have to stop adding stuff, or we'll be writing something way beyond the format of the articles for this conference.
posted by Torill at 05:16
14.2.02
The popularity of permalinks are a wonderful example of the thoroughness of blogs; most bloggers really do care that references should be exact and that sources should be openly available. This is an interesting similarity to academic writing, but without the rigorous dance of ritual forms - the link takes the erudite show-offishness out of citation but keeps the honesty of it.
posted by Jill at 11:56
In his vlog, Adrian has a nice summary of a difference writing in a blog rather than for publication or in a more ephemeral online environment: what is novel is the tone that i'm adopting. ordinarily when i write in any text app that is not visibly online (email, html or MOOs my tone is quite different. authorial, authoritative, academic, scholarly, teacherly (yeah, right), and various other 'formal' modes of utterance. blogs have changed that dramatically with a much more informal tone but with some of the hallmarks of print literacy. it resides in the public domain, they are authorial to the extent that they are written and published, and they career the imprimateur of semi permanence and care that email and other more 'oral' forms of electronic literacy don't quite get to. (no permalink; posted 18 sept 2001) I'm fondly amused that this paragraph is quite informal until it gets to the bit about being formal, and after there it just takes off. Of course, it might be intentional ;)
posted by Jill at 11:54
This is ancient (1998!) and about homepages, not blogs, and I haven't actually read it yet, but I think it's where I found that "writing oneself" expression I use in the paper that I didn't have a reference for. I'll have to read it a bit more before deciding whether it's really worth using.Chandler, Daniel (1998): Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web An older version of the paper is called Phenomenology of Writing by Hand in 1992.
Chandler's also written a book, out of print, but downloadable: The Act of Writing which is literally packed with references and discussions of what all manner of clever people have said about writing. This quote, for instance, from Montaigne, is very applicable to blogs:
Even Montaigne, who claimed to prefer speaking to writing but who was similarly aware that he adapted himself freely to his company, remarked that ‘many things that I would not confess to any one in particular, I deliver to the publick; and send my best friends to a bookseller’s shop, there to inform themselves concerning my most secret thoughts’ (Montaigne 1580, Bk. III, 9, p. 781).
We could write about blogs forever, you know.
posted by Jill at 06:06
Jill, stop procrastinating or I'll spank you.
That's not an idle threat!
posted by Torill at 05:38
13.2.02
We were talking about the various awards the other day, and how they're set up by individuals basically declaring themselves as an expert. Though they do invite general voting, the nominations are predetermined, I think. Here's an interview with Nikolai Nolan, who runs the Bloggies. WriteTheWeb: Deconstructing blogging: Nikolai Nolan (Deconstructing seems to be a very hip word)
posted by Jill at 09:16
I am in footnote/endnote hell.
posted by Torill at 05:22
"From the isolated splendour of ivory towers within the labyrinth of Universities and research-centres, one path to independence of a structure where even system criticism reinforces the power of the system is through breaking out of the pattern: to embrace the form which does not confirm the authority. However, according to Bourdieu, the system will embrace that rebellion quicker than you can produce new ways to undermine it. And this paper is such an embrace: incorporating back into the sphere of scholarship the tool which lets us publish independent of it."
This is what reading Bourdieu & Passeron Reproduction does to me.
posted by Torill at 05:02
I am posting this here as well, Jill, because this is one of the things you were mentioning Sunday, and I just found this while looking for something else:
Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste:
The contradictions or paradoxes to which ordinary language classifications lead do not derive, as all forms of positivism suppose, from some essential inadequacy of ordinary language, but from the fact that these socio-logical acts are not directed towards the pursuit of logical coherence and that, unlike philological, logical or linguistic use of language - which ought really to be called scholastic, since they all presuppose schole, i.e, leisure, distance from urgency and necessity, the absence of vital stakes, and the scholastic institution which in most social universes is the only institution capable of providing all these - they obey the logic of the parti pris......(page 476)
posted by Torill at 04:08
Weblogg-Ed
By way of Mark Bernstein, a site on using weblogs in education. Thanks, Mark.
posted by Torill at 00:43
12.2.02
We should remember that blogs tend to lead to physical, real life gatherings: blogger meetings. See the blogs of Francis Strand and Tinka, they are meeting in Copenhagen.
posted by Torill at 09:19
Bouncing the text back to Jill:
we need to be more explicit on how this is useful in research - I also think we should change the title and remove the bloggign as method, replacing it with blogging as tool. With that I run to a meeting, 15 minutes late but almost half-way through the text. And the foot-note/endnote system is a mess.
posted by Torill at 05:07
In an interview, Evan Williams defines blogs thusly: To me, the blog concept is about three things: Frequency, Brevity, and Personality. These are the three characteristics that I believe are the driving factors in weblogs' popularity as a publishing format. This clarification has evolved over time, but I realized early on that what was significant about blogs was the format -- not the content.
posted by Jill at 03:41
This Pyra Timeline is a pretty good starting point and overview for reviewing the history of Blogger.com and weblogs around it. Also mentions of the A-list, which is basically people connected to people who were involved with Blogger and Pyra, the company who made Blogger. Also, here's an interview with Ev where he says a little bit about the start: also noted in Ev's own blog, 23 August 1999.
posted by Jill at 02:56
Biz Stone: Keeping a Professional Blog
Here's his essay on keeping a professional blog. Definitely not text-book material, but fun reading.
posted by Torill at 00:55
A bloke called Biz Stone is writing a book about weblogs, and as one should in such circumstances, he's keeping a blog to go with it. The title of the book is Weblog: The New Home Page. He's only just started and it's unclear what his angle is going to be, but his other work is "Industry Articles, Product Reviews, and Essays" (with a really obnoxious tagline) so I imagine it's unlikely to be an academic book, or a book that's useful as a textbook.
posted by Jill at 00:07
11.2.02
Really bad blogs...
posted by Torill at 05:04
dust.from.a.distant.sun.
Tinka mentions why she likes to read web-logs: topics, originality and elegance of phrase.
posted by Torill at 02:07
10.2.02
Fortune.com - The Readers' Corner
Personal accounts on professional topics. Both this and the previous link from the Blogger homepage.
posted by Torill at 23:49
The Blog Phenomenon
Article on personal online diaries.
posted by Torill at 23:46
Collecting links, formatting the bibliography to an amazingly old-fashioned footnote system with no descriptions of how to refer to electronic sources - Chicago style, humanities version. Torill's writing a critique of just this. Other links we need to keep track of: Newslog at the BBC, an example of how professional media use blogs. And that article by someone called Deconstructing You Got Blog which discusses the A-list, in discussing Rebecca Mead's NY Times article You Got Blog! which describes love and blogs etc.
posted by Jill at 03:06
7.2.02
Jill will be along soon - tomorrow night I'll be picking her up at the ariport. I need five more pages before that, in order for us to have something to edit, reject and rewrite. It's getting closer to midnight, the kids are in bed and I am doing a bad job of translating a text which is already translated from german to norwegian into english. I think I'll wait until the library opens tomorrow. For once I have the advantage that I am not getting on a plane tomorrow!
posted by Torill at 13:42
Yes, I think it can be done. The blog can be compared to the french Salon, being empowered and energised by the ambivalence of existing between the public authority and the private sphere: personal, but not private, public, but with no more authority than the individual uttering the statement.
posted by Torill at 13:38
Online Journalism Review
posted by Torill at 04:37
More on Plastic.com and the visions of what it can be - am I the only one hearing Jurgen Habermas and even Berthold Brecht in the background here?
"Part of my job," Carl wrote in the last e-mail he sent me the day after we met, "I think, is to make Plasticians more aware of their collective worth, and how an ad hoc organization can lead to the empowerment of the individual, Star Trek: The Next Generation's propagandic portrayal of The Borg aside. It also shows the basic misunderstanding of Plastic by those who launched it: Plastic is described at the time as 'somewhere between anarchy and hierarchy' while in fact it's not between, since Plastic ultimately moves beyond the either/or. Rather, it's both. This isn't a matter of rhetoric; our ability to determine our destiny, rather than be determined by it, depends upon our ability to develop new tools with which to influence the course of events. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds: Locke, Rousseau, and others did no less by engendering new concepts of the self and society through a radicalization of existing categories of thought, the invention of new forms and discursive practices, and the radical theorization and adoption of emergent technologies. ...They published books.
posted by Torill at 04:04
The story of Plastic - is this blogging from the wrong end? Users as writers - but too much (non-existant) money put into editing them?
But the second half of that live collaboration, the premise as promise, set Plastic apart. Stories wouldn't merely be posted by users, they would be selected by the best editors to be found across the whole of the World Wide Whatever. Billions of billions of bytes distilled down to manageable KB chunks by a handful of affiliated editors, the smartest editors of them all.
In relation to blogging, that is a very interesting story. The way the blogging phenomena looks, this just might have worked. There are a lot of people who get their news not from organisations or institutions, but from individuals. Francis Strand worries about this in his post Feb. 7th.
posted by Torill at 03:51
6.2.02
I am in Ulsteinvik, on Ulstein Hotel at the moment, where they generously let me use the office computer so I could blog this to Jill:
Blogging for others: blogging in the public sphere
a) The net, the news and the blogger
- News on the net: fighting for the audience
- Democratic ideals and rational discourse
- Public space expanded: personal publication
b) Academics and Audiences
- Myths of Academia: the Ivory Tower
- Myths of Audiences: the unwashed masses
- Cultural Capital: the currency of scholars
- Economic Capital: the Currency of survival
c) I Can Write!
- Rhetoric of conversations
- Rhetoric of Scholarship
- Pure Forms
- Stagnation
- Revival of the discourse
d) What's So Special Online?
- blogger as a channel
- the resistance of technology
- Editing
- Push-button-publishing to the people (OK, that was a cheap point)
posted by Torill at 00:54
5.2.02
Thinking with one's fingers was not invented with word processing or with blogs. E.M. Forster had the same experience: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" I'm re-reading Michael Heim's interesting philosophical approach to word processing, written in 1987 and dealing extensively with the ways in which changed tools for writing change our ways of thinking. He builds on Ong and Havelock, calling their approaches "the transformational theory of language technology", and has a lot of interesting things to say. The Forster quote introduces one of Heim's chapters. "See what I say" - without knowing the context (Heim gives no reference and the web gives dozens of loose citations in clever quotation collections but no reference or context) it's impossible to say whether that's about speaking or writing one's ideas.
posted by Jill at 22:18
This is the blog of a paper, or a blog towards a paper about blogs as tools for scholars, and blogging as a research methodology. Here's the abstract for the paper. The deadline is hard upon us. We're writing separate sections now, and on Friday night I'll spend the weekend with Torill in Volda (a pulsing metropolis I've never set foot in before) to sew it all together and make it into a wonderful 10000 word article. Monday it has to be in, then there's discussions with the editors for the rest of February and publication in a hopefully very glossy and impressive volume, ready for the SKIKT methodology conference where we'll present it. I think Torill's presenting her views on all thsi in Oslo, and I'm planning on using our clever thoughts in a talk at the Art College here in Bergen on the 18th of February - and we also want to use it as our vitenskapsteoretisk innlegg. Cunning, aren't we?
And so, to work.
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