Last Thursday I gave a presentation at the Blogging the Humanities symposium, held at the beautiful Trinity Irish Art Research Centre (TRIARC), which is sited in some converted stables in the Provost’s gardens, right next to the Nassau Street boundary wall. I was taking part because of my participation with Ian Russell in the Academic Blogging seminars (and the Academic Blogging blog) held in the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland earlier in the year.
On one of the sunniest days of the year, a large group of, broadly academic, bloggers gathered in the TRIARC seminar room to discuss academic blogging practice. The symposium was organised by the editors of Pue’s Occurrences, the Irish History blog, so many thanks to them for putting together a stimulating and varied line-up. I’ll link to other participants’ summaries of the proceedings here, before giving my own view of what I thought were the most interesting strands to emerge from the discussions.
A list of participants, along with a precis of each presentation is available on Pue’s Occurrences here. A summary of the issues discussed at the conference can be found at Rob Kitchin‘s Ireland After NAMA blog. John Cunningham, also a participant at the symposium, summarises the proceedings at the History Compass Exchanges blog. Donal O’Falluin, who blogs on Dublin radical history, has a report at Come Here to Me!, which is a very interesting group blog.
My own presentation attempted to look at the possibilities and problems of academic blogging, situated within wider discourses of the digitization of the humanities (Blackboard, etc) and the decline of print. The powerpoint slides, which won’t tell you too much, are here.
The tension between the printed word and the digital word animated many of the discussions throughout the day. Whether it was Rob Kitchin’s experience of blog posts swiftly becoming news stories, or of the need to stretch the readership of a blog beyond the confines of the internet via printed advertisements in universities and local libraries (Pue’s Occurrences), it was clear that there is an ongoing relationship between the blog form and older forms of media.
The blog also provides a means of archiving material in digital form, ensuring that the (academic) blogger can reach audiences who may never consult a traditional paper archive. These issues were discussed by both Donal O’Falluin and Ciaran Swan, representing the Irish Left Archive. In both cases, these blogs had generated a conversation about archival material, which often resulted in more material, such as pamphlets, being sent in by readers. Central to this, both Donal and Ciaran agreed, was establishing a sense of trust, partly resulting from the relative informality of the blog form.
Greg Baxter talked about his efforts to establish a web magazine about literature and visual art, Some Blind Alleys, which quickly thrived, and attracted a large number of readers. But Greg said that the site demanded a huge commitment in terms of time, and he has since discontinued publication, although the site remains live for his own personal blogging and to promote other ventures.
One of the most interesting aspects to emerge from the discussions was, for me, the relationship between an institution, such as a museum or university, and the blog format. Aoife Flynn, of the Sligo Model Weblog discussed how the blog functions as an extension of the Model arts centre, a use that was especially useful when the building was closed for refurbishment. This seemed to me a proper use by an institution of the blog format to explain itself to the public – a function that is surely central to publicly funded institutions in the age of the internet. However, there is a tension between the informality of blogging and the established power relationships of a large institution. Blogging could quite easily be seen as a threat to the traditional way things are done, and thus many institutions (without naming any names, of course) prefer to sweep it off the table and out of the way. Yet suppressing these issues does a disservice to the institution. Blogging has the potential to be an ongoing tool for dialogue with the wider public, and to ignore that potential is wrong.
There are plans for a follow-up conference to be held at the end of the year. The editors of Pue’s Occurrences are seeking people to help organise the conference, and suggestions for participants. You can contact them via their homepage here.
