On Tribble

Bear in mind that “…if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.”

Sharon Howard notes the return of Ivan Tribble to the subject of blogging. Tribble’s position was that blogging is a bad thing for someone in search of an academic job, and gave examples of how a blog was always a negative feature in an interview. This annoyed a variety of people who took the opposite view. Tribble’s return heralds a modification of views:

Some people rightly took me to task for condemning blogging as a whole on the basis of a few practitioners. Some sites offered a corrective response, sharing tips or success stories of how blogs actually helped their careers.

In the blogs where I’ve read entries on Tribble’s comments there have been thoughtful and intelligent skewering of his assumptions.

Sample bias anyone? Most days I don’t read blogs at random. I visit the ones that interest me, which usually mean they are intelligent. I’m interested in learning to write well, and that’s more likely to happen if I read good writing. However I do sometimes read random blogs. I do it via Blog Explosion, but you can also do it via the next blog link on Blogspot blogs in the top-right hand corner. It’s quite an education because the vast majority of blogs are not very good. How common are good blogs?

You’d think they’re common. Certainly it’s always possible to find something interesting to read. But I’ll read archaeology, history, maths, astronomy, biology… How many good archaeology blogs with serious academic content are there? Much as I like Archaeoblog, it doesn’t often reveal much about the authors’ opinions. The number of archaeology blogs with commentary is limited, as noted by the TVfT.

What about Classics? You could use Rogue Classicism as a starting point. There’s slightly more to read, but again you’ll soon end up going round in circles. History has more academic blogs, but again, perhaps I’m picky but given the sheer numbers of historians, there’s not an overwhelming number of good sites. That probably isn’t a popular thing to say, because bloggers do take attacks on blogs in general as personal attacks on them.

As an Another Damned Medievalist comments in the Little Professor:

So I will probably never get a job, I guess. Would it help if I stopped blogging and just put up a sign that said I’d read Mr. Tribble’s stuff and realized he was right and I’m ever so sorry?

But if you look at her site you notice it’s not a typical blog. It’s interesting, engaging and regularly updated. Did Tribble see sites like this, or sites like the ones you find if you visit a blog directory and burrow down to history? Of the three examples given by Tribble, only one site was connected to the discipline applied for. Take the time took look away from the usual sites you visit and you can find plenty of people have would have good reason to not include their URLs in their CV. In an evening browsing Blog-Explosion I can expect to find just one site I’d like to re-visit. Try it with Blogger. Click on the ‘next blog’ link at the top of any blogspot hosted site and see when you next find an interesting site.

Another major issue is understanding what a blog is. Tribble has pretty explicitly stated what the problem is:

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don’t “get it.” That’s right, I don’t. Many in the tenured generation don’t, and they’ll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.

Sharon Howard has written a good post defending blogs, but I wonder if she’s wasting her time. It’s not a discussion that needs to take place on blogs, because the people who don’t get them won’t read them. I’ve written “Not all of us have Apple Macs…” but I don’t know if it will reach the audience it needs to. The original plan was to place conference proceedings in a peer-reviewed English-Lit journal, but that’s not happening. Certainly if you want to reach people who are still suspicious of the internet then a blog is not the way to publish, not matter how persuasive the argument.

A discussion is needed because blogs are a self-reinforcing social unit. There are so few people publishing, it’s likely that the blogs you read will also cite you, which can perhaps lead to the illusion that you’ve influenced thoughts rather than reflected the views of a small community. If blogging is to work as an academic tool it needs to be bigger and it needs to attract the vast majority of academics who are not technophiles (at least in the Arts). There are still people who “don’t get” email. How do you explain what a blog is to someone like that?

After a few seconds wearing my big cynical hat I think I have an answer. People understand publications, so why not use the networking potential of blogs to organise an electronic conference? Choose a theme and have people write papers on topic. Invite other ‘attendees’ to comment on the papers and then publish the papers and selected comments as a conference volume, possibly via Lulu so you could publish for free. Hey presto, the contributors have at least one published paper, some people have editorship of a volume and you have something to put on your CV that is a product of your blogging. Ok, so you’d have to be pretty odd pay to for a book when they could read the stuff online for free. But people who don’t get blogs would do that, and sit back in awe of someone who’s producing a steady stream of papers. Ok, so they still won’t ‘get’ blogs, but they’ll as least see papers and they understand those.

A lot of the reaction to Tribble is the produce of very intelligent people preaching to the converted. If blogging is to become seen as a valuable academic activity some serious evangelising needs to be done in print. Either that, or else people need to do something with their blogs that cannot be ignored, but again that would suggest migration to print where the mainstream will see it. From an electrophile’s perspective it seems a horrific waste of trees, but the medium needs to prove itself. So far it hasn’t. —–