An Article Abstract on Archaeological Blogging

Over the past couple years, I’ve been turning over in my head an article idea about archaeological blogging. I have written a good bit on my blog about the virtues and prospects of writing about my research and teaching on a nearly daily basis, but I’ve so far found it difficult to wrap my various ideas (reflexive, reflective, and otherwise) into a cohesive argument.

I tried with this thing, but it’s hard not to see it as a mess.

So with the open invitation to contribute something to an Internet Archaeology volume dedicated to blogging and edited by the spectacular Colleen Morgan, I decided to take another stab at it.

My biggest struggle is attempting to understand how blogging in the archaeological community fits into the larger trajectory of blogging and publication on the web. I started with the  idea that blogs began with the promise of creating communities on the web (even before social media). The blogroll and sharing links established communities of likeminded readers. At the same time the regular, daily posts that tended to be short, filled with links, and informal created some generic expectations that many bloggers followed.

More recently, however, I have this feeling that blogging – as Jason Kottke has observed – is (not) dead, and in a period of transition as the traditional practice of ordering posts by days gives way to more elegant and topic organization of content. And the long form potential of the internet has challenged the dominance of short informal notes. Sites like Medium may not be the precise way forward, but its hard to avoid thinking that they are the general direction that online, personal publishing will go. In archaeology, being traditionalists, we may continue to blog in a chronological format drawing on longstanding models from the archaeological notebook or field dispatch. But as we have started to use our web presence for more than just regular reports from the field, we may begin to think about how the blogging platform fits can contribute to larger enterprise of reimagining publication.

So here’s my abstract for now:

From Blogs to Books Blogging as Community, Genre, and Platform

Looking back at my first efforts to describe the blogging phenomenon among Mediterranean archaeologists in 2008, I was reminded how the work at the intersection of blogging and archaeology defied simple characterization. At the same times, blogs created communities of readers and allowed for public experiments with the traditional generic conventions of academia as bloggers reflected, speculated, and annotated their experiences. The speed of blogging, the networks it created and relied upon, and the range of different functions blogging served from public relations to academic notes, initiated a key reimagining of our professional discourse by the archaeological community.

In recent years, archaeological bloggers begun to move the platform used for blogging in the direction of a new forms of archaeological publication. It is worth noting that there is nothing inherent in the technology of blogging that makes it incompatible with academic publishing. In fact, even the casual, conversational style of an informal blog post can echo the style of the more academically respectable conference paper. Moreover, new platforms like Medium dispense with the rigid chronological formatting associated with blogs and provide graphically sophisticated and appealing final product. More importantly, these new forms offer both a speed of delivery absent in traditional print publications as well as space for interaction between author and audience and can accommodate audio, video, and interactive media that are only now being incorporated into the more digital versions of traditional journals.