I’ve found that commenting on other people’s posts is the biggest way of attracting more readers. (Relevant comments, of course.)

I am now inspired to write (part of) my dissertation on construction paper. I’ve also thought about using lipstick, fingerpaint or interpretive dance, though. Maybe all of the above would make it go faster.

You’re definitely right with your riposte to #2 — I don’t know if there is any benefit to work-related instead of completely unrelated procrastination —- I’m still wasting time when I reread Boice’s advice for new faculty members — I was thinking that the _feeling_ one has of having gotten work done was somehow a trap. But I use that excuse when I do my dishes to, so maybe it all evens out.

I was recently told that maybe 80% of all grad students study 20th C lit. That’s definitely the case at my program. I dunno about, say, faculty breakdown at small colleges, which was actually what I was picturing with my comment.

The anonymity in reviewing is another interesting topic. I would just point out now that “regular” print publishing is wayyy slow and delays of only a month or two are the lucky breaks. I’d be interested in thinking more about reviewing in “good faith” mentioned somewhere earlier; I’ll go look at the Crooked Timber stuff later when I’m not so tired.

The bloggers over at Crooked Timber have been focused on problems of credentialing and of compelling/rewarding targeted critique. Henry Farrell seems to suggest that reviewing is ultimately a karmic force, difficult to police or reward. But it seems that keeping the reviewees (as well as the reviewers) anonymous, at least for a time, would be in keeping with the blindness of karma…

As for peer-review on blogs, I’m not sure how to work out the logistics. Like you, I like the idea of blind peer review – especially as a newbie. Would an article up for review online be kept anonymous for a certain period of time?

You know, I link to all these bloggers I love, but even after 10 years of this I’m surprised when you people come back to read mine.

About 30 minutes after I posted this blather I read Adam Kotsko’s critique of academic blogging, and although I have trouble imagining you and Adam getting along he certainly agrees with your point 3. This appeal to form is the most damning argument, I think: we don’t write dissertations on construction paper, so why write scholarly inquiries on blogs?

You’re right, of course, but I wonder if that’s the fault of blogs or the fault of academics. Is there a case to be made that we should be able to write out critical ideas in fewer than 300 words? Fewer than 200? I know we’re not Gawker, but is that inherently a good thing?

Well, okay, yes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t afford to write more tersely.

Points 1, 2, 4: I’m totally with you. Well, partially.

1: I think the scene is changing. When I started co-teaching a course on academic blogging for my Writing Center a year or two ago we sent around emails to faculty on hiring committees. The chair of the history department said, basically, “We’re interested in an applicant we have this year because he keeps a good blog. Actually, the blog is how he came to our attention.” Certainly that’s not representative of every department everywhere, but it suggests that the stigma is fading.

2: If not blogs then World of Warcraft, or heroin, or reading the New Yorker—we ABDs are world champion procrastinators.

Your theory about medievalists makes a lot of sense to me, but I guess I don’t know the relative populations of medievalists and modernists. Does English lit follow a bell curve? A few meds, a few mods, mostly Shakespeareans?

Our Finnegans Wake group used to meet at a bar—it would take two pints before it began to make sense.

I think I’m going to go link you to my blogroll, if that’s okay.

1) it currently is not valued in a way that will help grad students get jobs or new faculty get tenure —- unless perhaps you are studying digital literature or something web-related —- and thus could hurt people more than it helps,

2) time. Blogging and web research can turn into a huge time-suck; right now I use them as a way of relaxing and letting off steam and have to always be careful not to let reading and commenting on blogs (Hi!) get substituted for my real work. Likewise, I only have a couple good hours in the morning when I’m really really sharp and at my best on revising; if I’m not disciplined I waste my morning energy on reading blogs and playing scrabble on Facebook and then try to write later when I’m sleepy and grumpy,

3) how useful are these discussions to outside viewers anyway? I bet writing a post on one’s diss topic helps clarify one to oneself immensely, but to one’s readers…? I have a bunch of dense and difficult theory blogs bookmarked but I never read them because, really, if I have the energy to think my way through Das Kapital or of Grammatology, shouldn’t I spend that energy going back to the source rather than read the sketchings of someone who may be no more knowledgeable about these things than I am?

4) for me, the advantage to blogs is the ability to play with aspects of voice and creativity that are pretty much not accepted within mainstream academic work, and the more fun it is, the less I want my blog actually associated with “me.” Currently, “Sisyphus” is more like my academic id than the scholarly image I’d want to present, and I could see people liking the persona but getting turned off by this behavior —- whining, venting, snarking, playing memes on the internet —- in an “actual person.” Considering I still don’t have a job, I’m very conscious of this, and glad that if you were to google me you wouldn’t be able to find all sorts of random ramblings I had tossed off one night while drinking wine. (and life would be no fun if I wasn’t allowed to do that _somewhere_)

You ask in an earlier post why there’s such a large community of medieval bloggers and don’t seem to be many modernist bloggers (aren’t they all about paranoia and surveillance? Maybe that’s why. Or is that the pomo-ists?) I was going to point out that for most medievalists I know, they are the only one of “them” at their institution and are the most likely, from what I’ve seen, to have their courses not fill. I think the inability to talk to people in your department about your work is what drives people to do scholarly work in online communities; maybe the modernists don’t need that because they are not so isolated? (Or maybe it’s because no one, not even a modernist, sits down at 10:30 pm with a glass of wine and says, “hey, I know! I’ll bust out a brand-new theory on Finnegans Wake! — heh, sorry.)

And with that, I’ll just say I need to stop avoiding my chapter. Back to the salt mines…