Academic blogging

 

1. The question

A reader of the previous post on this blog wondered about the role of blogging in the writing process. For example, are blog posts a good way to put out drafts?

Here are a few thoughts on the use of blogs in academic writing. In section 2 we shall concentrate on the blog post that is written as a step on the way to some other piece of work, where the post may or may not amount to a draft. In section 3 we shall look at blog posts that are written as parts of a public drafting exercise. In section 4 we shall consider the place in academic practice of blog posts that are themselves intended to be finished pieces of work. In section 5 we shall note some side-effects of the use of blog posts.

2. A blog post that is a step on the way

We shall start by considering a blog post as a step on the way to a longer piece, for example a paper in a journal. Here the main thing will be the envisaged longer piece. The blog post itself might be a draft, or it might be far from being even a preliminary draft. It might for example merely sketch a question to tackle and some lines of enquiry.

While comments on the post are likely to be sought, any resulting dialogue will be used in preparing the longer piece but may not be regarded as a result in its own right. We shall cover dialogues as results in their own right in section 3.3.

This use of a blog post as a step on the way is a natural extension of discussions with others, whether spoken or in writing, about ideas one has for future work. If an author shares an idea with others, feedback on lines of enquiry and on important considerations can be very valuable. If a blog post gets the attention of knowledgeable people, they can provide useful feedback either by commenting publicly or by sending private communications.

What is different from private discussions is that a blog post is public. Anyone can read it, not only those whom the author wishes to consult. And anyone might comment on the post or on other comments that are made publicly.

There are advantages to this degree of publicity.

One advantage is that if an author is going to expose a piece of work to public view, he or she is likely to put effort into making it clear and as intellectually respectable as is feasible. Even if the piece is clearly labelled as only some initial thoughts, the author's reputation will be on the line to some extent. The process of putting thoughts into a presentable form is itself likely to spark fresh thoughts in the author's mind.

Another advantage is that a wider range of comments may be obtained than would be available from consulting people privately.

A third advantage is that public posts facilitate the advancement of knowledge. A post may spark thoughts in a reader who can then start his or her own project.

There is the associated risk that someone else may develop the ideas in a blog post in the same way that the original author would have done, making it pointless for the original author to develop the project in the way envisaged. But at least he or she would have publicly established priority in the ideas. And while it might be nice always to have priority in developing one's ideas, it is not at all clear that there should be any right to do so, or that the existence of any such right would be beneficial to the world of thought.

3. Blogs as writing in public

3.1 The practice

There is a practice of writing in public. The intended sense here is that of making evolving drafts visible, and perhaps inviting comments. We do not mean sitting in a café and publicly tapping on a laptop. A web search for the phrase "writing in public" will turn up plenty of comments on the practice, although some of them will relate to the café sense that we do not intend.

A sequence of blog posts on a given topic would be one way to write in public. It would keep each version distinct from others. 

Another option would be to follow the model of open source software and write in a Git repo that is made available to the world on Github or some similar service. Readers might then be allowed to propose changes directly. Successive versions and the differences between them would be visible, but people would be most likely simply to look at the most recent version on the main branch, especially if there had been frequent commits or there were several branches. To that extent, a sequence of blog posts would make the development of thought more visible.

3.2 Benefits shared with blog posts as steps on the way

Writing in public may have several benefits. We shall start with benefits that are shared with the writing of blog posts as steps on the way to longer pieces, where the posts may or may not amount to drafts of those longer pieces.

There is the benefit of forcing oneself to produce work that is reasonably polished, and the benefit of having fresh thoughts sparked in the effort to achieve an appropriate standard. The pressure to improve the quality of a piece of work may however be less when one is avowedly publishing drafts, because it is clearly understood that they will be improved later. A blog post that is not published as part of an exercise in writing in public must be able to pass for a finished piece of work, because there is no evidence on its face that it is still work in progress.

The benefit of obtaining a wide range of comments carries over from the publication of individual blog posts with a view to producing longer pieces later.

The benefit of facilitating the advancement of knowledge by sparking thoughts in others likewise carries over from the publication of individual blog posts.

3.3 Benefits specific to blog posts as public drafts

We shall now turn to considerations that are specific to blog posts written within a process of writing in public.

One benefit is the motivation to keep going. If readers have been promised a more developed version of a piece of work, the author may feel committed to producing it. Since there is almost always scope for improvement, it is unlikely that the author will look at a version already published and declare some time afterwards that it is the final version. An author may however declare at the time of publication of a version that it will be the final one.

Another benefit lies in the dialogue that is generated by successive drafts and comments on them. Such a dialogue may be seen as a valuable piece of work in its own right, regardless of whether any ideal final form of the work being drafted is reached. The activity of debate can be instructive both to the participants, and to outside readers who merely review successive versions and responses to them. 

Dialogue may be the locus not only of instruction, but also of virtue. On this, there is a paper currently in draft by Frisbee Sheffield, entitled "Socrates and Dialogue as the Greatest Good", which will appear in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 2024-25 (volume 125).

4. Blog posts as finished pieces of work

It is perfectly possible for a blog post to be a finished piece of work, rather than a step on the way to something else. Essays have long been a respectable literary form. The blog post can be a modern embodiment of this form, with a few differences.

One difference is that there can be a convenient facility for readers to comment.

Another difference is that there is more variation in length than has been traditional, with some posts being very short while others have the more traditional essay length of several thousand words.

Another difference is that the traditional publishing process is bypassed. There are no delays, and no need to go through review or copy-editing. There may of course be a loss here. Such processes can improve work before it is shown to the world. But a blogger who is concerned about such things can always ask a colleague to review work before publication.

A consequence of bypassing the traditional publishing process is that a blog post cannot be regarded as on a par with a peer-reviewed scholarly paper. There is not normally any systematic review under the control of someone other than the author.

This is however not a serious loss for a piece of work in the style of an essay in the humanities. The form is not one dedicated to establishing specific conclusions by reference to evidence, but one dedicated to presenting an illuminating view of a topic.

5. Side-effects

5.1 The erosion of boundaries

5.1.1 Connections between pieces

If blog posts are used as steps on the way to further posts or to work in other forms, boundaries between individual pieces of work may be eroded.

There is nothing new about drafts of pieces of work, but such drafts have traditionally been hidden from view. And while there are books and papers that explicitly develop other pieces of work by the same authors, the majority of published work is not like that. What is new with blog posts that are steps on the way is that they are public drafts or public statements of intent to work on a given topic in a particular way, at the same time as being capable of being viewed as works in their own right so long as they are sufficiently full and polished.

The result when blog posts are steps on the way is that rather than a set of free-standing pieces, bound together only by authorship and some recurring themes, we see an organic body of pieces that can be read separately but an important feature of which is that they are bound together. The binding may be more or less tight, and earlier pieces may point more or less clearly to the contents of later pieces. But one would not get a proper view of the author's achievement if one did not recognise the binding.

5.1.2 Forms of writing

There are some traditional forms of writing - essays, academic papers, monographs, and so on. The blog post is a newcomer, even if it might be thought to have predecessors from earlier centuries in published letters and other short pieces in journals.

Adding a new form of writing tends to erode sharp boundaries between forms, for two reasons. 

The first reason is that a blog post can be a perfectly respectable piece of work in its own right, despite lacking some traditional features such as having gone through a standard process of review and publication. So those features are seen not to be essential, and they no longer appear to demarcate serious writing from casual jottings and journalism.

The second reason is that the more forms of writing one has, forms that share some characteristics but not others, the easier it is to see a spectrum of forms that merge into one another. Large gaps between forms that would encourage clear demarcation are filled in by new occupants.

It is good to erode traditional boundaries between forms of writing. What matters is the content rather than the method of publication. And blog posts certainly make it easier to put content out into the public domain.

5.2 Citation and attribution

A blog post that is not part of a sequence of drafts can be attributed to its author like any other piece of writing, and cited by others so long as the URL is stable.

When there are modifications in later versions of a post or in a finished piece in some other form in response to comments, and the modifications are substantial and incorporate text supplied by commentators, attribution may be more problematic. There may come a point, particularly in an exercise in writing in public, when a mere acknowledgement of assistance provided by commentators is inadequate. A post or other finished piece should then be regarded as having one lead author and several other contributors. There would however be the difficulty of getting the consent of commentators to have their names on the work, given that they might still have substantial disagreements with its content.

When there is a sequence of drafts, there is also a problem of citation. Traditionally, when papers have been circulated in draft, there has eventually been a version of record, and this has been the one to cite. This practice can continue with a sequence of drafts so long as it is clear which is the final one. But if earlier versions remain available, it is perfectly possible that they will contain material worth citing that has been deleted from the final version. So the same post, with variations, may be cited under several URLs. And what is thought to be the final version may get cited under its URL, but then turn out not to be final, with the new final URL not replacing or being added to the earlier one in citations already given.

There is a solution, exemplified by the arXiv ( https://arxiv.org/ ). In that repository, each version of a paper has a page with an abstract and a link to the full text. There is also a short URL which always points to the page for the latest version, and that page includes links to pages for earlier versions. So one can give the short URL and also mention the version cited. Then anyone who uses the short URL can find all versions. 

This degree of organisation could be implemented by individual authors within their own blogs, although it would be more convenient to have a blog post that served as the main page and that simply contained links to all versions, treating the latest version in the same way as earlier versions. Then there would be no need to change the content of the main page beyond adding links to new versions. Others could give the URL for the main page and state which version they were citing.

The use of blog posts in academic work may also have effects on the ease with which academics who are building their reputations and careers can get credit for their work and for getting widely cited. But there are ways in which we could adapt. And any losses would be small compared to the prize of getting out into the hands of the public more work, and work that was better because it had been subject to comment and modification.