Why the New Blog?

This is the first post on the new blog!

For those of you interested in what will happen to the old blog (or Volume 1 as I think of it), go and check out The Archive of the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World here.

For those of you who are always looking to the future, I am sure some of you are wondering why in the world I would decide to inconvenience my daily readers, fragment my audience, and go through the trouble of creating a new blog.

Here are my initial thoughts:

1. The weight of the past. The more I looked at the “first volume” of the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, the more I decided that I need to bring on iteration of the blog to a close and start again with a clean slate.  After all, print publications regularly define separate volumes annually in a rather arbitrary format to define content.  Blogs, of course, are the opposite. They tend to be massive, rambling, and undefined.  I was satisfied with that for a while, but with each passing post, I felt greater and greater pressure to lend some continuity and coherence to my blog. I spent more and more time searching for earlier posts and linking to them or creating indexes around particular themes.  The more that I did this, the more nervous I became about maintaining links within the blog to ensure a cohesive user experience. I imagined a future where the need to link to literally hundreds of earlier posts and ideas would exceed my ability to manage, so I decided just to start over.  I am sure that I will continue to link back to posts on the earlier blog (now housed in “The Archive”), but I want to use the new blog to look ahead.

2. My Tenure Application.  As loyal readers know, I submitted my application for tenure and promotion this fall. I mentioned the blog in passing in a space on my curriculum vitae for “non academic projects” (video, blogs, popular writing, et c.), but I think that I can say that it did not factor at all in the decision to award me tenure (or not as my proposal is still coursing through system).  This was both gratifying and disappointing. After all, the blog represented a significant body of work associated closely with my professional life. Moreover, it did detract from time that I could have spent preparing material for teaching, research, or even service. I had hoped in some perverse way that the blog would inspire conversation or pique interest.  It seems to have done neither.  People know about the blog, and it even gets mentioned in the dry-as-dust introductions before academic talks, but no one cared. At all. So the second volume of this blog will proceed with that in mind. I will formally abandon my hope that a blog could at least generate some conversation about how we imagine ourselves as members of the academy and members of society.  I can be more self-serving in the blog and write it without any “political” or professional goals.

3. The need for fixity. I think part of the anxiety I came to feel about maintaining my blog and making sure that it mattered was because I had come to think of it as a fixed thing (despite knowing and sometimes saying otherwise).  I saw its reassuring appearance on the screen, the networks of links, the connection between different media as girded about by an expectation of permanence.  Maintaining these permanent places and connection (in an environment where such relationships are largely impossible!) was stressful and pointless.  So wrenching the blog from this false expectation of permanence, doing violence to the various links (while still acknowledging that such connections did exist), and disrupting the connection between various forms of media was a relief in that it reminded my that electronic transmedia texts like blogs are not ossified, but dynamic.

4. Typepad.  When I first started blogging, I really liked Typepad. It was different from the growing legion of Blogger and WordPress blogs.  It featured nice design quirks and allowed me to edit (to the extent of my abilities) my CSS.  I still like the statistics page (although I think it is fairly optimistic) and the way that it lets you manage comments and posts.  On the other hand, the company was recently sold. I have increasingly found the prospects of migrating from my custom CSS (that feeds into my Google Analytics site) to a new theme or layout be daunting. I have found the detailed and sophisticated back end of the site to be increasingly onerous to navigate.  For example, I couldn’t figure out how to add my Twitter feed to the blog.  And I already have a few other blogs in WordPress.com.  Since I was looking at some significant changes to my blog anyway, I decided to move to WordPress to consolidate my blog empire.

5. Who are my readers?  The great thing about a blog with a substantial archive is that it become increasingly visible to search engines. So each week more and more people (or bots of various kinds) visit my blog.  While I like that my blog is visible and to some extent popular, I’d also like to get a true metric of my daily readership.

6. Boredom.  Over the last few months, I’ve been a bit bored.  So I decided to do something different and shutting down and archiving the old blog provided me with a new challenge for my early morning work hours.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working to get this blog up and running.  The holidays, travel, and the start of the new semester will both provide some content, but also some distractions for my blogging routine, but rest assured that I will continue to write just as regularly as with the old blog. It’s the only way I know how to work.