A Tourist Guide to the Bakken Oil Patch
This morning I posted a draft of the introduction and conclusion to my Tourist Guide to the Bakken Oil Patch to the online publishing site Medium. I’m just a bit excited about the experiment and will almost certainly publish drafts of the rest of the Guide to Medium over the next few days
I used Medium, rather than my trusty WordPress blog for a number of reasons. First, it seems more suited to long form reading and while none of the individual sections of my guide are long by Archaeology of the Mediterranean World standards, they are just on the edge of tl;dr status on a typical blog. So I wondered whether the clean interface on the Medium would make it easier to read.
More importantly than that, Medium allows readers to comment on specific paragraphs rather than just comment at the level of the blog post. This is a very helpful way of collating comments on a longer manuscript and allows readers to post their immediate gut reactions to a particular section.
My plan is to use the comments assembled at the Medium to revise my manuscript prior to submitting it for peer-review and publication. As readers of this blog know, this project places me a wee bit outside of my traditional, academic comfort zone, so I’m particularly eager to get some feedback on how I do as a historian of North Dakota, as a commenter on our modern, industrial condition, and as an author of something more popular than scholarly (although this work has clearly academic goals).
I intend to serialize my tourist guide over the next couple of weeks, but for this first group of posts, I have focused on my introduction and a fairly rough draft of my concluding comments. More of the tourist guide proper will follow, so please stay tuned!
A Tourist Guide to the Bakken Oil Patch
Table of Contents
I.1. A Brief Industrial History of the Bakken CountiesI.2. Practical Notes on Travel, Roads, and Weather in the BakkenI.3. Technical Notes and Key Terms about the BakkenI.4. Controversies and ConcernsI.5. The North Dakota Man Camp ProjectI.6. Further Reading
II. Route 1: Minot to Ross II1. Route 1a: Ross to White Earth
III. Route 2: Ross to Tioga
IV: Route 3: Tioga to Williston IV.1. Route 3a: Wheelock, Nession Flats, East Williston IV.1. Route 3b: Wildrose
V: Route 4: Williston to Watford City
VI: Route 5: Williston to Sidney, MT
VII: Route 6: Watford City to New Town
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