This is a little exercise I thought I'd try--don't know whether it will help or not.
Sorry, folks, the poll doesn't work without a Blogger account--rats! I guess this is why everyone uses WordPress nowadays...
I appreciate the effort anyone made, however. You'll be seeing more info soon. In the meantime, please feel free to continue the conversation if you like.
Let's say (hypothetically) that I think I've solved a longstanding and fairly well-known problem in the field of early Christian literature. (No, it has nothing to do with Secret Mark--please remain calm). I feel I have a fairly good case to make for it.
Should I just blog about it here, or should I first take the time to get a publishable paper ready and start submitting it to journals?
Obviously, from a scholarly standpoint, the answer is: publish. But could I do both? Could I blog about it first, then try to publish?
Some other barriers for me include the fact that I'm not a student in anything remotely resembling early Christian literature. Nor have I ever published before. My credentials consist of a B.A. in Philosophy. While I would like to try for a graduate program application in the fall, it's a bit of a long shot, due to my lack of experience in the field, and my letters are all in philosophy.
So, I've added a Blogger gizmo and made a poll, which you can see at the right-hand side of the screen.
If you choose the sixth option, feel free to add a comment with your alternative. Please also feel free to add any other related comments you'd like, such as the topic of biblioblogging in general.
So what do you think? Should I just put it out there? Or should I wait and get all the ducks in a row first?
It didn't seem to want to let me vote. Blogging ideas and then publishing them in a more rigorous expression isn't uncommon these days.
ReplyDeleteGood luck, whichever you decide!
You know, I should blog about this, but... did you know that the unofficial University of Helsinki policy regarding the very question you ask is that one should never, ever give out one's original ideas before one has published them in an academic journal or other scholarly publication? I suggest you make your case into an article and submit it first: in the worst case you will get valuable feedback from the peer-review process, and who knows: it might as well get published as is! Blogging is a quicker forum, but scholarship is not always about getting there as fast as one can.
ReplyDeleteThanks, James and Timo for your helpful comments. Sorry the poll didn't work!
ReplyDeleteI should add that these two attitudes seem to span the spectrum of opinion out there on blogging vs. peer-reviewed publishing. I am particularly interested in comparing book publishing to blog publishing. Books are technically not like peer-reviewed journals, in that publishing-house editors are not like academic reviewers. They need no academic credentials whatsoever before deciding to publish a text. Yet the resulting texts become as much a part of cited literature as anything published in the journals. What writers do to earn this recognition, however, is important: the best ones seek out professional readers to provide feedback before publication, providing a peer-review-like process, even though those readers cannot give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on publication like a journal's editorial board can. In some ways, blogs are just a method for speeding up that professional-feedback process (though this is obviously not how they are always used, or even usually used).
ReplyDeleteSo with all due respect to them, the U. of Helsinki's policy seems somewhat antiquated. I understand where they are coming from, but I'm not entirely sure what practical purpose it serves in today's world. Still, it is worth taking seriously, and I will think it over.
One way in which blogs differ is that another way book authors can ensure their scholarship is taken seriously is by seeking out publishing houses that will grant some sort of legitimacy to their ideas, usually academic presses. The assumption seems to be that the editors will likely have some credentials, and that the publishing houses will take their decisions to publish seriously enough for the resulting works to be at the same level of scholarship as peer-reviewed journal articles. Blogs lack this stamp of approval, however.
It would be nice if university presses could establish and manage their own Web-based clearing houses for academic blogging. You would have to present your blog proposal to the press, and they would add your blog to their site, or reject it if they didn't want to be associated with it. Your blog posts could have editors that would read and accept or reject them, perhaps providing comments and/or edits. They could be forwarded to circles of scholars who could do the same if they found time for it. Bloggers would be expected to acknowledge these scholars by name in their published posts, and this editorial work could be presented by faculty to tenure review boards for their appraisal. It would slow down the Web-publishing process for the blogger, but in return they would receive the peer-reviewed stamp of approval on their blogging, and their posts could be safely cited by any researcher.
The journals would, of course hate this. Come to think of it the publishing houses would, too, since why write a book if you can just write a blog post? So maybe the presses could just start charging for access to their clearing-houses. Indeed, these academic websites could eventually replace many journals and low-print-run books (and libraries might come to love them).
What about posting to one of the various email-lists on relevant subjects? Crosstalk2 or Synoptic-L, for example (both of which I subscribe to). Crosstalk specifically states:
ReplyDelete"Additionally, XTalk is intended to be a venue in which those working professionally in the field of Historical Jesus studies and Christian origins may post and receive critical responses to papers or ideas that are in the process of development."
I don't know if that conforms to the standards of Helsinki, but then I'm neither a professional scholar nor a graduate student, so I don't really need to uphold anyone's reputation except my own...
As for my amateur status, XTalk also lets non-scholars participate, as long as they adhere to the highest professional standards. Not a problem. And I would of course use my real name, rather than my handle here.
ReplyDeleteI ran into a related problem submitting an article to a journal. They refused to even look at it because, in their words, it had already been published on my blog/web page. In fact, only a part of the article had been published (an English translation of a Syriac text); the vast bulk of the article--manuscript descriptions, commentary, the Syriac edition--had not been placed on the page.
ReplyDeleteTony
Hi Tony--very interesting. That's another reason why I think I am slowly going to migrate my thoughts off-site and into more professional forums. This site has been wonderful as a test-bed for my investigations, but I think it's finally time to start participating via other channels.
ReplyDelete